Ideal solution - Nubians attacking muslims,when Zanji revolt hit.And Khazars deciding that it is time for plunder from weaken enemy/muslims/
If Indo-romans jumped then,it could be over.
Alternate History Vivat Stilicho!
- Thread starter Circle of Willis
- Start date
If Indo-romans jumped then,it could be over.
@Circle of Willis , i accidentally discovered,that China knew from 4th century BC about drug for Malaria.
They named it as gighao/made from Artemisia anna intense/ and is easy to made - just take 2 liter of cold water,extract juice from few artemisia plants into it,and,after drinking,you are healthy.
You could not boil it.
Fun thing - commies re-discovered it in 1972/dr.Tu Youyou/,but hide from rest of world,so they get Nobel for that in 2015.
Here,China with troops do not suffering from malaris could keep winning in tropical parts of Asia,and later Africa.
Drug was descibed in book from 4th Century BC made by GE HONG.
They named it as gighao/made from Artemisia anna intense/ and is easy to made - just take 2 liter of cold water,extract juice from few artemisia plants into it,and,after drinking,you are healthy.
You could not boil it.
Fun thing - commies re-discovered it in 1972/dr.Tu Youyou/,but hide from rest of world,so they get Nobel for that in 2015.
Here,China with troops do not suffering from malaris could keep winning in tropical parts of Asia,and later Africa.
Drug was descibed in book from 4th Century BC made by GE HONG.
A New Home for the Lost Tribes
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Capital: Atil.
Religion: The Three Paths – the ancestral Tengriism of the Khazars, Buddhism as absorbed from the Eftals and Tegregs of the southern lands, and Judaism which was brought by Jewish exiles from the Holy Roman Empire – are the dominant sects on the Khazar-ruled steppes. While the recent Khagans have converted to Judaism and made an effort to syncretize the three into a truly new religion, this effort has not been entirely successful and at best they can be said to have constructed some bridges between the triad. The Severian Slavs (those who do not still hold to the old ways of the Slavs, anyway) and the Greek cities of the Tauric Chersonese form a Christian minority, as well, and there is a bustling Islamic minority of expatriate merchants & their families living in Atil. Most of the Khaganate's other constituent tribes still uphold the pagan ways of their ancestors, be they Slavic or Finno-Ugric or Altaic in origin.
Language: Khazar, an Oghur Turkic tongue related to Bulgar, is naturally the primary language spoken by the Khazars themselves and the lingua franca of their Khaganate. Hebrew remains the sacred language of the Khaganate's century-old Jewish population and those who have converted to join them. Other languages of lesser prestige spoken by the Khazars' subjects include Alan, (Volga) Bulgar, the East Slavic or Antaic speech of the Severians, and various Finno-Ugric languages including Möger[1].
The old saying is that no empire lasts forever, and between the extraordinarily harsh winters and competition for hunting & grazing lands between the nomads, that is doubly true on the wild Pontic steppe where life is often shorter and harsher still than in the settled lands. Fortunately, in the black soil beneath the blue skies here, new life always finds a way to sprout from the carcass of the old. Such has been the story of the Khazars – in their own tongue, Xasar – who first entered the pages of history as just one of numerous Turkic tribes yoked beneath the mighty Tegreg Khaganate which once stretched from the Persian Gulf and the rivers of Mesopotamia to the Gobi Desert, but then rose to assert themselves as masters over much of the Eurasian steppe when their masters were overthrown between the resurgent power of Rome, the ascendant might of Islam and the Later Han at their zenith.
The Khazars have enjoyed this position of supremacy for over a century now – certainly their empire has proven more durable than that of the Tegregs, who fragmented in half in less time than that. In the process they have weathered civil wars which would have destroyed lesser khanates, grown remarkably rich off of the riverine & landward trade routes crisscrossing their part of the continent, and formed the third leg of the triad of empires dominating western Eurasia. They have contended with both the Hashemites and the Romans from time to time, managing to carve off chunks of both in victory and survive in defeat, and preserved their spiritual independence by spurning both Islam and Christianity in favor of Judaism, the oldest of the Abrahamic faiths whose legacy has been claimed by its rivals. What's more, their late Khagan Simon-Sartäç was a bold visionary – for better and for worse – so ambitious as to try to weld the new faith, which he inherited from his mother, to the ancient traditions passed down from his father Bulan and the Indian pathways to enlightenment which his cousin-wife Esin tried to walk; and in this he proved able and lucky enough to make some headway. Evidence of this can be seen on their very banner, a clear sign of either syncretic wisdom gained from bringing multiple wildly different religions together or sheer schizophrenic madness depending on how favorably disposed the observer is toward Simon-Sartäç's efforts.
But no matter how successful and prosperous they might seem in the present, a wise ruler on the nomadic steppes should always remember to look to the future with caution, and never allow their greed and their ambitions to overtake their common sense. Bulan Khagan forgot this in the end: inexplicably coming to believe that he actually had a chance at seizing control of the eastern half of the Roman world (to which he believed his mother, the eldest daughter of Helena Karbonopsina, had a claim), he ended what would otherwise have been a very long and glorious reign by dashing himself to pieces against the legions of Christ under the command of Aloysius II, third of Rome's Five Majesties and his own cousin. Simon-Sartäç forgot it too near the end of his own life, and was saved from tampering once more with religious affairs in a course sure to end in embarrassing (if not fatal) failure only by dying at the right time.
Now Simon-Sartäç's son Isaac Khagan rules in Atil, and has hopefully learned well of both what to do and not do from the example set by his father and grandfather, as well as those of past nomadic empires such as the Huns and Tegregs. At this point in time it would seem to an outside observer that he has taken all the necessary lessons to heart: thus far he has avoided conflict with both Rome and the Hashemites abroad, and bound up the wounds from the fallout of his father's last defeat at home. Though the steppe empires are not exactly known for stability, and indeed almost every time a Khazar Khagan decided to promote his brothers to the rank of subordinate khan it has ended badly, Isaac has even managed to maintain amicable relations and a healthy working relationship with his brother Zebulun Khan. But then, Bulan's and Simon-Sartäç's reigns started off well enough too. Time will tell whether Isaac and his heirs can keep these relatively good times going, or even inaugurate a proper golden age for Khazaria – if they can survive this new ninth century, then they can rightly boast of being the most durable steppe empire yet. But if not, then they will join the same grave as their Tegreg forebears and Attila's Huns before them, and there is no shortage of rival tribes both within and without their borders who would not think twice of feasting upon them and usurping their position if given half a chance.
As the name 'Khazar Khaganate' indicates, at Khazaria's head there rides a Khagan (Khazar: Xâqân), invariably drawn from the branch of the great Ashina clan which has traditionally ruled over the Khazar people: traditionally they have claimed descent from the legendary figure Yizhi Nishidu, one of the ten half-human sons of the she-wolf Asena from whom the dynasty acquired their name, but since converting to Judaism they have also claimed to be the long-lost descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel in general (a fanciful myth which would be appropriated by other dynasties and ideologues in the distant future) and the House of Jehu in particular (though to the Christian Romans and most non-Steppe Jews, that line ended with the pitifully short reign of Zechariah of Israel). Indeed, they also further claim to have reunited the bloodlines of the long-fallen Northern Kingdom with that of the still-extant Judeans of the former Southern Kingdom by way of Bulan Khagan's marriage to the African exile Rachel bat Isaac. In this manner the Ashina say theirs is a pedigree to rival that of the Blood of Saint Jude to the west and the House of the Prophet to the south.
Now in their early years, the Khazars upheld a system of dual kingship in the Turkic style, dividing monarchical responsibilities between the senior Xâqân and a junior 'Khagan-Bek' (Khz.: Xâqân-Bex) with the former being more of a ceremonial & spiritual leader while the latter handled earthly duties, such as leading the Khazar hordes in warfare. This system of governance is still upheld by some of their vassals, such as the Magyar tribes living around the southern Ural Mountains and the more distant and 'barbaric' Turkic peoples to the east like the Oghuz. Traditionally one Ashina brother would hold the spiritual Khaganate and the younger brother closest to him in age would hold the temporal one, with any younger brothers of theirs who they saw fit to assign a governorate to becoming lesser Khans (Khz.: Xân). Theoretically this division of powers was supposed to be both ordained by the heavens and helpful to the Khazars by allowing for multiple princes to concentrate on different duties, but in practice, as can be expected this arrangement turned out to be rather less than stable and led to more than a few civil wars even as the Khaganate grew in size and power, the latest and most devastating of which was the one between Bulan and his brothers (both of whom he had to fight in order to take & secure his throne) in the early eighth century.
As part of his sweeping reforms Simon-Sartäç, who conveniently had no living brothers by the time he took the throne (his mother Rachel birthed no other son and had a hand in eliminating at least some of his half-brothers born to Bulan's other wives, the ones who weren't killed in battle with the Romans anyway), abolished this increasingly obviously outdated and detrimental arrangement. From his reign onward the Khazars were to only have one Xâqân who would govern them in both religious and secular affairs, and who must be as comfortable conversing with sages in religious garb as he is when in armor when wielding lance and bow at the head of the army: for his example Simon-Sartäç looked to the Hasmonean dynasty of Israel, who ruled the Jews as both king and high priest[2]. Lesser Ashina scions might still be assigned to rule parts of the greater empire as their own fief with the title of Khan, and those princes without a fief were usually dubbed Tarkhan (Khz.: Tur-Xân); but none were supposed to have any pretense to the highest office which only the mightiest and most enlightened man in the clan was fit to occupy, by the grace of God and the ancestral spirits both.
Isaac ben Simon(-Sartäç), Khagan of the Khazars as of 800 AD. Where once the Khazars had two Khagans, they now only have one, ostensibly following in the footsteps of the Maccabean priest-kings of the last truly independent Judean state. Isaac himself has cut his beard and styled his hair into sidelocks according to Jewish custom
The supreme sovereign of the steppes is supported in his duties by a government apparatus whose sophistication never ceases to surprise outside observers expecting a simplistic, Darwinian hierarchy of nomadic chiefs killing one another to climb the ladder, invariably under the misguided impression that the Khazars (and perhaps all steppe nomads in general) are little more than savage thugs. Khazar administration incorporates not only the actual Khazars themselves, but also many representatives from their subject peoples – other Turks, Bulgars, Slavs, Alans and other Caucasian peoples, Jews and even expatriate communities of note, mostly Muslims but also including a fast-growing community of Norse traders from the far north these days: in other words, theirs is an administration as ethnically diverse as (and certainly more religiously diverse than) those of the Holy Roman Empire and the Hashemite Caliphate, at least post-Hashim al-Hakim in the latter's case. Beneath the Khazar khans & khagans themselves, vassal tribes like the Magyars, Kimeks and Volga Bulgars enjoy a great deal of autonomous self-governance in their ancestral lands under their own rulers, who are titled 'Elteber' (Khz.: Eltäbär) in official Khazar correspondence.
For a nomadic horde, the Khazars have found themselves ruling over quite a few settled towns around the Black Sea, and indeed they have built one such city to serve as their capital – Atil, a bustling commercial center situated in the delta of the great Volga River which is host not only to the greatest families of the Khazar elite but also substantial communities of foreign merchants & dignitaries. Of the others some, including all the cities of the Tauric Peninsula, were built by the Greeks; but east of the Tauric Chersonese it is the Jewish exiles from Roman Africa who have founded most of the towns. Each town, representing a fortified nexus of trade on the steppes, has been granted the privilege of electing their own governor, who is titled babagchuq ('father of the city') by the Khazars: in exchange however they must submit to taxation, thereby financing the Khazars' war machine and the projects of the great Khagan, and to the monitoring of a resident supervisor appointed by said Khagan called a tudun, who spies to ensure the townsfolk are not plotting sedition against their overlord and has the authority to remove a babagchuq & temporarily assume control of the urban administration if it becomes necessary (for example, because the babagchuq just got caught committing the crime of sedition against Ashina rule).
Since the Khazars rule over a multi-ethnic and multi-religious domain, the Khagans have had to take great pains to balance the concerns of their diverse subjects. Simon-Sartäç tried to merge Judaism, Buddhism and Tengriism under the umbrella of his 'Three Paths', which has been a partial success at best; but even if they are not interested in furthering his religious reforms, his descendants can at least see some wisdom in continuing to surround themselves with a council of sages from all three faiths and others of import to minorities among their subjects, such as Muslims and Christians. It was Simon-Sartäç's father Bulan who created a corps of trained jurists called kündürs, literate and multilingual officials who are charged with keeping the peace between the various ethnic groups & sects and with fairly arbitrating in inter-tribal or inter-religious disputes: both Simon-Sartäç himself and his son Isaac have since wisely expanded the ranks of the kündürs. For his part, as of 800 Isaac is also in talks with the Hashemite court of Caliph Hussein to appoint a governor called the Khazz for the fast-growing Islamic quarter of Atil, as part of a deepening of ties between Khazaria and the Islamic world to counter Roman advances into the steppe by way of the Christianized Ruthenians.
In order to keep up with (and imitate) their Roman & Arab rivals, the Khazar Khagans have established a mint in Atil and created their own currency, stamped with their face or religious symbols (usually a Jewish menorah or Star of David) on one side and religious messaging on the other, coupled with a date based on the Hebrew calendar (which begins with the creation of Adam). This 'sheleg' (Khazar for 'shekel') reads 'Moses, Prophet of God' and dates to the year 4540 after the Creation of the World (780 AD)
Now in their early years, the Khazars upheld a system of dual kingship in the Turkic style, dividing monarchical responsibilities between the senior Xâqân and a junior 'Khagan-Bek' (Khz.: Xâqân-Bex) with the former being more of a ceremonial & spiritual leader while the latter handled earthly duties, such as leading the Khazar hordes in warfare. This system of governance is still upheld by some of their vassals, such as the Magyar tribes living around the southern Ural Mountains and the more distant and 'barbaric' Turkic peoples to the east like the Oghuz. Traditionally one Ashina brother would hold the spiritual Khaganate and the younger brother closest to him in age would hold the temporal one, with any younger brothers of theirs who they saw fit to assign a governorate to becoming lesser Khans (Khz.: Xân). Theoretically this division of powers was supposed to be both ordained by the heavens and helpful to the Khazars by allowing for multiple princes to concentrate on different duties, but in practice, as can be expected this arrangement turned out to be rather less than stable and led to more than a few civil wars even as the Khaganate grew in size and power, the latest and most devastating of which was the one between Bulan and his brothers (both of whom he had to fight in order to take & secure his throne) in the early eighth century.
As part of his sweeping reforms Simon-Sartäç, who conveniently had no living brothers by the time he took the throne (his mother Rachel birthed no other son and had a hand in eliminating at least some of his half-brothers born to Bulan's other wives, the ones who weren't killed in battle with the Romans anyway), abolished this increasingly obviously outdated and detrimental arrangement. From his reign onward the Khazars were to only have one Xâqân who would govern them in both religious and secular affairs, and who must be as comfortable conversing with sages in religious garb as he is when in armor when wielding lance and bow at the head of the army: for his example Simon-Sartäç looked to the Hasmonean dynasty of Israel, who ruled the Jews as both king and high priest[2]. Lesser Ashina scions might still be assigned to rule parts of the greater empire as their own fief with the title of Khan, and those princes without a fief were usually dubbed Tarkhan (Khz.: Tur-Xân); but none were supposed to have any pretense to the highest office which only the mightiest and most enlightened man in the clan was fit to occupy, by the grace of God and the ancestral spirits both.
Isaac ben Simon(-Sartäç), Khagan of the Khazars as of 800 AD. Where once the Khazars had two Khagans, they now only have one, ostensibly following in the footsteps of the Maccabean priest-kings of the last truly independent Judean state. Isaac himself has cut his beard and styled his hair into sidelocks according to Jewish custom
The supreme sovereign of the steppes is supported in his duties by a government apparatus whose sophistication never ceases to surprise outside observers expecting a simplistic, Darwinian hierarchy of nomadic chiefs killing one another to climb the ladder, invariably under the misguided impression that the Khazars (and perhaps all steppe nomads in general) are little more than savage thugs. Khazar administration incorporates not only the actual Khazars themselves, but also many representatives from their subject peoples – other Turks, Bulgars, Slavs, Alans and other Caucasian peoples, Jews and even expatriate communities of note, mostly Muslims but also including a fast-growing community of Norse traders from the far north these days: in other words, theirs is an administration as ethnically diverse as (and certainly more religiously diverse than) those of the Holy Roman Empire and the Hashemite Caliphate, at least post-Hashim al-Hakim in the latter's case. Beneath the Khazar khans & khagans themselves, vassal tribes like the Magyars, Kimeks and Volga Bulgars enjoy a great deal of autonomous self-governance in their ancestral lands under their own rulers, who are titled 'Elteber' (Khz.: Eltäbär) in official Khazar correspondence.
For a nomadic horde, the Khazars have found themselves ruling over quite a few settled towns around the Black Sea, and indeed they have built one such city to serve as their capital – Atil, a bustling commercial center situated in the delta of the great Volga River which is host not only to the greatest families of the Khazar elite but also substantial communities of foreign merchants & dignitaries. Of the others some, including all the cities of the Tauric Peninsula, were built by the Greeks; but east of the Tauric Chersonese it is the Jewish exiles from Roman Africa who have founded most of the towns. Each town, representing a fortified nexus of trade on the steppes, has been granted the privilege of electing their own governor, who is titled babagchuq ('father of the city') by the Khazars: in exchange however they must submit to taxation, thereby financing the Khazars' war machine and the projects of the great Khagan, and to the monitoring of a resident supervisor appointed by said Khagan called a tudun, who spies to ensure the townsfolk are not plotting sedition against their overlord and has the authority to remove a babagchuq & temporarily assume control of the urban administration if it becomes necessary (for example, because the babagchuq just got caught committing the crime of sedition against Ashina rule).
Since the Khazars rule over a multi-ethnic and multi-religious domain, the Khagans have had to take great pains to balance the concerns of their diverse subjects. Simon-Sartäç tried to merge Judaism, Buddhism and Tengriism under the umbrella of his 'Three Paths', which has been a partial success at best; but even if they are not interested in furthering his religious reforms, his descendants can at least see some wisdom in continuing to surround themselves with a council of sages from all three faiths and others of import to minorities among their subjects, such as Muslims and Christians. It was Simon-Sartäç's father Bulan who created a corps of trained jurists called kündürs, literate and multilingual officials who are charged with keeping the peace between the various ethnic groups & sects and with fairly arbitrating in inter-tribal or inter-religious disputes: both Simon-Sartäç himself and his son Isaac have since wisely expanded the ranks of the kündürs. For his part, as of 800 Isaac is also in talks with the Hashemite court of Caliph Hussein to appoint a governor called the Khazz for the fast-growing Islamic quarter of Atil, as part of a deepening of ties between Khazaria and the Islamic world to counter Roman advances into the steppe by way of the Christianized Ruthenians.
In order to keep up with (and imitate) their Roman & Arab rivals, the Khazar Khagans have established a mint in Atil and created their own currency, stamped with their face or religious symbols (usually a Jewish menorah or Star of David) on one side and religious messaging on the other, coupled with a date based on the Hebrew calendar (which begins with the creation of Adam). This 'sheleg' (Khazar for 'shekel') reads 'Moses, Prophet of God' and dates to the year 4540 after the Creation of the World (780 AD)
The Khazars themselves rode into the history books as a group of nomads, much like the other great Turkic tribes, and in that regard they have changed little as of the year 800. They are expert horsemen and nomadic pastoralists, breeding and tending the great herds of formidable horses for which they are famous in addition to sheep, goats, donkeys, etc. and migrating from pasture to pasture every season. From these herds the common Khazars do derive their livelihood in peacetime: the sheep & goats provide them with wool for clothing and lamb, mutton and sausages for consumption, while horses afford them great mobility on the Pontic Steppe and in addition to the consumption of horse-meat when needed, the milk of mares is fermented and consumed by their Khazar riders as a drink called kumis. The majority of Khazars still have not settled down in one place but rather move with their herds, pitching felt yurts when they have come to a stop for the season only to pack it & their belongings up and return to the saddle when it's time to move again, and all those who have been subjugated beneath the Khaganate's standard must tolerate the nomads' arrival in and use of whatever grassland they have for pasture.
Speaking of the Khazars' subjects, those constitute the great majority of the Khaganate's population, rather than the Khazars themselves. The greatest of these constitute autonomous tribal nations within the ranks of the Khazar Khaganate, with the privilege of being governed by their own customs and chieftains (called elteber in Khazar correspondence) in exchange for their provision of warriors & supplies to the Khazar army in wartime, and grazelands to nomad Khazars in times of peace. Many of these subject tribes are actually other nomads following a similar lifestyle to the Khazars, and indeed almost all of them are fellow Turks of one kind or another: Bulgars, Burtases, Barsils, Baranjars and Sabirs west of the Ural Mountains and Kimeks, Karluks and Oghuz Turks to the east. Many of the former had roamed the Pontic Steppe before the Khazars came barreling through and boast of ties to the great and terrible Hunnic Empire prior to its destruction in the mid-5th century, while the latter set had once helped the Khazars and Later Han topple the Northern Tegreg Khaganate before the Ashina inevitably turned on them.
Among the great non-Turkic subjects of the Khazars the most notable are the Magyars, the Severians and the Jews. The Magyars (or Möger as they might call themselves) are unique in that, despite being a nomadic people surrounded by Turks, they are not Turks themselves – indeed based on their speech it would seem their closest relatives are (in the sense that one can still consider his third cousin a distant kinsman), of all peoples, the primitive and sedentary Finno-Ugric tribes who call the furthest northern forests and ice wastes home such as the Mari, Mescheras and Meryans. The Severians meanwhile are Slavs of Antae stock, kindred to the likes of the Drevlians and Polianians who have since merged into the Ruthenians. Like the other Sclaveni they are a settled and agrarian folk, dwelling in farmsteads & villages on the left bank of the great Dnieper River where they grow wheat, barley & rye in the rich black soil; hunt beavers and squirrels for fur & to diversify their cereal-heavy diet, and sometimes also bears for the sake of prestige; and also engage in beekeeping on a large scale, to produce honey and wax. Finally the Steppe Jews, descending primarily from African exiles and secondarily from the Jewish communities of the more recently conquered Tauric Peninsula or from the Persian Jews of the northeastern Caucasus (Juhuro), constitute the most urbane and urbanized population within Khazaria, dominating its cities and supplying most of its babagchuqs. In Khazaria these people – formerly bereft of a truly secure homeland since their ancestors were definitively expelled from Judea by Hadrian – have found their first stable sanctuary in 600 years, far removed though it may be from the holy sites of any actual spiritual or sentimental importance to them.
Six chiefs of the Magyars coming to petition their suzerain, Isaac Khagan
As has been said before, despite being nomads at heart the Khazars have found themselves in possession of an awful number of settled towns along the southern and western reaches of their domain. These towns are anchored along the banks & portages of the great steppe rivers – Dnieper, Don, Volga – as well as their lesser tributaries, fed from and feeding on the northernmost great trade routes in the known world. By navigating these rivers merchants, be they Khazar or Judean or Norseman or Slav, can relatively easily travel from town to town and kingdom to kingdom to exchange goods such as amber, timber, furs & slaves from the north for valuables from the more civilized south such as wine, glass, jewelry and spices. Thus, far from being some wintry wasteland inhabited only by woodland savages or nomadic herders, it would be more accurate to note Khazaria as a land of busy markets and merchants traveling with loads of cargo under the protection of its warrior nomads.
To both serve as a fixed capital and capitalize on these lucrative trade routes, atop the nexus of many of said routes in the Volga's delta the Khazars have built one great city of their own: Atil, a bustling town that might as well be a metropolis by steppe standards, host to great expatriate communities of Christian and Islamic merchants in addition to the Khazars themselves & their subjects. From Atil's port traders can enter from or exit to the Caspian Sea, providing a strong economic link to both additional Caucasian ports under Khazar control and the Hashemite Caliphate directly to their south. Different stages of its construction were influenced by the Khatuns (empresses) of Kundaçiq and Bulan Khagan, and it shows – the former's wife Irene, a Christian Greek princess of the Roman East by birth, was a patron of the Christian quarter and can be thanked for the existence of both Ionian churches and Roman-style bathhouses within the city limits, while the Jewish quarter with its synagogues and yeshivas owe their thanks to latter's Jewish wife Rachel, on top of the conversion of the Ashina imperial household to Judaism.
A busy Atil market in summertime. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and merchants from as far off as Liang China can be seen gathering to engage in business here
On that note, it is nearly impossible to discuss the Khazars without also mentioning their strange, and yet strangely harmonious and balanced, array of religions. Not content simply to convert to Judaism, from the reign of Bulan's son Simon-Sartäç onward the Ashina have also striven to unite this eldest of the Abrahamic religions with the ancestral Tengriism of their people and the newer Buddhist tradition brought by incorporating the Tegreg remnants in Khazar Khorasan. To accomplish a feat as herculean as this, Simon-Sartäç tried to accentuate the similarities between each creed and to promote syncretism by integrating the divinities & traditions of the three religions into the others' framework: recasting the Tengriist gods and spirits as devas and bodhisattvas, promoting mystical meditation among the Jews and presenting Buddhism less as a rival religion and more like a lifestyle to them, and so on.
Thus far the Khazar ruling class has achieved some success in syncretizing Buddhism with Tengriism, rather less success in bringing Judaism and Buddhism together, and almost none to speak of in uniting Tengriism with Judaism. In 800 AD, it is still unusual but not totally alien for (as an example) a Steppe Jew to also regard the Buddha as a venerable sage (while his Buddhist counterpart would by turn describe the Jewish prophets as bodhisattvas), practice lacto-vegetarianism in line with the Buddhist principle of ahimsa or absolute non-violence, and engage in meditative techniques to calm himself & draw closer to God. At a stretch he may even tolerate his Tengriist friends hailing Jehovah under the name of Tengri and the archangel Michael, defender of Israel as 'Ak-Koyash', while also sharing with his Buddhist friend his hope for the coming of the Messiah – known to the Easterners as 'Maitreya Buddha', who will achieve enlightenment, build the Third Temple in Jerusalem and inaugurate a new age or kalpa. Fortunately, though by the end of his life the increasingly senile Simon-Sartäç had come to fancy himself that Messiah and the Maitreya Buddha both, he died before he could actually act on the more radical reforms he had in mind (and almost certainly inspire a drastic backlash which would've destroyed the limited gains of his Three Paths), and while his successor Isaac has not abandoned the Three Paths he has also resolved to avoid courting rebellion by further meddling in these sensitive affairs of the soul.
Jewish sages in Atil's great synagogue poring over the Torah & Talmud in search of any passages that can serve as the foundation for mutual understanding with Buddhists and Tengriists, as commanded by Simon-Sartäç
As to the other two Abrahamic religions, the Khazars' relationships with Christianity and Islam tend to fluctuate depending on the state of the Khaganate's respective relationships with the Holy Roman Empire and the Hashemite Caliphate. At present, while still guardedly tolerant of Christians, the Khazars regard the second Abrahamic religion and its adherents with suspicion, viewing Christianity's Ionian creed (the only one that matters, in their view, since no great heretical movement exists in or near their lands, unlike Miaphysitism and Monophysitism in the Arab lands) as but an extension of Roman power. This is especially true of their Severian thralls, who Simon-Sartäç and Isaac both consider a potential fifth column eager to break free from the Khazar yoke and join the rest of their Ruthenian brothers across the Dnieper, as has seemed highly possible since the Romans defeated the Khazars twice in war.
In turn the Severian Slavs, who comprise the largest (and still growing) Christian element within the Khaganate, resent the tuduns' spying on them and intruding on their religious services, which is doing little to suppress their dislike of Khazar rule and willingness to join up with the rest of the Ruthenians at the first chance. Conversely, the Khaganate has recently warmed up to Islam and Isaac is in talks with Caliph Hussein to appoint an autonomous governor or Khazz for the Muslim quarter of Atil, in addition to exploring the possibility of a Muslim-Khazar alliance against the Romans if the former should consistently gain the upper hand in their latest war. However, a few decades ago the situation was the complete opposite, with the Khagans up until (and, for a while, actually including) Bulan being friendly to Christianity and cold toward Islam so long as their old alliance with Rome held. No doubt the present course will find itself reversed if the Khazars ever reconcile with the Romans and begin to work against the Muslims once more.
Isaac Khagan receiving an embassy sent by the Caliph Hussein at the end of the eighth century
Speaking of the Khazars' subjects, those constitute the great majority of the Khaganate's population, rather than the Khazars themselves. The greatest of these constitute autonomous tribal nations within the ranks of the Khazar Khaganate, with the privilege of being governed by their own customs and chieftains (called elteber in Khazar correspondence) in exchange for their provision of warriors & supplies to the Khazar army in wartime, and grazelands to nomad Khazars in times of peace. Many of these subject tribes are actually other nomads following a similar lifestyle to the Khazars, and indeed almost all of them are fellow Turks of one kind or another: Bulgars, Burtases, Barsils, Baranjars and Sabirs west of the Ural Mountains and Kimeks, Karluks and Oghuz Turks to the east. Many of the former had roamed the Pontic Steppe before the Khazars came barreling through and boast of ties to the great and terrible Hunnic Empire prior to its destruction in the mid-5th century, while the latter set had once helped the Khazars and Later Han topple the Northern Tegreg Khaganate before the Ashina inevitably turned on them.
Among the great non-Turkic subjects of the Khazars the most notable are the Magyars, the Severians and the Jews. The Magyars (or Möger as they might call themselves) are unique in that, despite being a nomadic people surrounded by Turks, they are not Turks themselves – indeed based on their speech it would seem their closest relatives are (in the sense that one can still consider his third cousin a distant kinsman), of all peoples, the primitive and sedentary Finno-Ugric tribes who call the furthest northern forests and ice wastes home such as the Mari, Mescheras and Meryans. The Severians meanwhile are Slavs of Antae stock, kindred to the likes of the Drevlians and Polianians who have since merged into the Ruthenians. Like the other Sclaveni they are a settled and agrarian folk, dwelling in farmsteads & villages on the left bank of the great Dnieper River where they grow wheat, barley & rye in the rich black soil; hunt beavers and squirrels for fur & to diversify their cereal-heavy diet, and sometimes also bears for the sake of prestige; and also engage in beekeeping on a large scale, to produce honey and wax. Finally the Steppe Jews, descending primarily from African exiles and secondarily from the Jewish communities of the more recently conquered Tauric Peninsula or from the Persian Jews of the northeastern Caucasus (Juhuro), constitute the most urbane and urbanized population within Khazaria, dominating its cities and supplying most of its babagchuqs. In Khazaria these people – formerly bereft of a truly secure homeland since their ancestors were definitively expelled from Judea by Hadrian – have found their first stable sanctuary in 600 years, far removed though it may be from the holy sites of any actual spiritual or sentimental importance to them.
Six chiefs of the Magyars coming to petition their suzerain, Isaac Khagan
As has been said before, despite being nomads at heart the Khazars have found themselves in possession of an awful number of settled towns along the southern and western reaches of their domain. These towns are anchored along the banks & portages of the great steppe rivers – Dnieper, Don, Volga – as well as their lesser tributaries, fed from and feeding on the northernmost great trade routes in the known world. By navigating these rivers merchants, be they Khazar or Judean or Norseman or Slav, can relatively easily travel from town to town and kingdom to kingdom to exchange goods such as amber, timber, furs & slaves from the north for valuables from the more civilized south such as wine, glass, jewelry and spices. Thus, far from being some wintry wasteland inhabited only by woodland savages or nomadic herders, it would be more accurate to note Khazaria as a land of busy markets and merchants traveling with loads of cargo under the protection of its warrior nomads.
To both serve as a fixed capital and capitalize on these lucrative trade routes, atop the nexus of many of said routes in the Volga's delta the Khazars have built one great city of their own: Atil, a bustling town that might as well be a metropolis by steppe standards, host to great expatriate communities of Christian and Islamic merchants in addition to the Khazars themselves & their subjects. From Atil's port traders can enter from or exit to the Caspian Sea, providing a strong economic link to both additional Caucasian ports under Khazar control and the Hashemite Caliphate directly to their south. Different stages of its construction were influenced by the Khatuns (empresses) of Kundaçiq and Bulan Khagan, and it shows – the former's wife Irene, a Christian Greek princess of the Roman East by birth, was a patron of the Christian quarter and can be thanked for the existence of both Ionian churches and Roman-style bathhouses within the city limits, while the Jewish quarter with its synagogues and yeshivas owe their thanks to latter's Jewish wife Rachel, on top of the conversion of the Ashina imperial household to Judaism.
A busy Atil market in summertime. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and merchants from as far off as Liang China can be seen gathering to engage in business here
On that note, it is nearly impossible to discuss the Khazars without also mentioning their strange, and yet strangely harmonious and balanced, array of religions. Not content simply to convert to Judaism, from the reign of Bulan's son Simon-Sartäç onward the Ashina have also striven to unite this eldest of the Abrahamic religions with the ancestral Tengriism of their people and the newer Buddhist tradition brought by incorporating the Tegreg remnants in Khazar Khorasan. To accomplish a feat as herculean as this, Simon-Sartäç tried to accentuate the similarities between each creed and to promote syncretism by integrating the divinities & traditions of the three religions into the others' framework: recasting the Tengriist gods and spirits as devas and bodhisattvas, promoting mystical meditation among the Jews and presenting Buddhism less as a rival religion and more like a lifestyle to them, and so on.
Thus far the Khazar ruling class has achieved some success in syncretizing Buddhism with Tengriism, rather less success in bringing Judaism and Buddhism together, and almost none to speak of in uniting Tengriism with Judaism. In 800 AD, it is still unusual but not totally alien for (as an example) a Steppe Jew to also regard the Buddha as a venerable sage (while his Buddhist counterpart would by turn describe the Jewish prophets as bodhisattvas), practice lacto-vegetarianism in line with the Buddhist principle of ahimsa or absolute non-violence, and engage in meditative techniques to calm himself & draw closer to God. At a stretch he may even tolerate his Tengriist friends hailing Jehovah under the name of Tengri and the archangel Michael, defender of Israel as 'Ak-Koyash', while also sharing with his Buddhist friend his hope for the coming of the Messiah – known to the Easterners as 'Maitreya Buddha', who will achieve enlightenment, build the Third Temple in Jerusalem and inaugurate a new age or kalpa. Fortunately, though by the end of his life the increasingly senile Simon-Sartäç had come to fancy himself that Messiah and the Maitreya Buddha both, he died before he could actually act on the more radical reforms he had in mind (and almost certainly inspire a drastic backlash which would've destroyed the limited gains of his Three Paths), and while his successor Isaac has not abandoned the Three Paths he has also resolved to avoid courting rebellion by further meddling in these sensitive affairs of the soul.
Jewish sages in Atil's great synagogue poring over the Torah & Talmud in search of any passages that can serve as the foundation for mutual understanding with Buddhists and Tengriists, as commanded by Simon-Sartäç
As to the other two Abrahamic religions, the Khazars' relationships with Christianity and Islam tend to fluctuate depending on the state of the Khaganate's respective relationships with the Holy Roman Empire and the Hashemite Caliphate. At present, while still guardedly tolerant of Christians, the Khazars regard the second Abrahamic religion and its adherents with suspicion, viewing Christianity's Ionian creed (the only one that matters, in their view, since no great heretical movement exists in or near their lands, unlike Miaphysitism and Monophysitism in the Arab lands) as but an extension of Roman power. This is especially true of their Severian thralls, who Simon-Sartäç and Isaac both consider a potential fifth column eager to break free from the Khazar yoke and join the rest of their Ruthenian brothers across the Dnieper, as has seemed highly possible since the Romans defeated the Khazars twice in war.
In turn the Severian Slavs, who comprise the largest (and still growing) Christian element within the Khaganate, resent the tuduns' spying on them and intruding on their religious services, which is doing little to suppress their dislike of Khazar rule and willingness to join up with the rest of the Ruthenians at the first chance. Conversely, the Khaganate has recently warmed up to Islam and Isaac is in talks with Caliph Hussein to appoint an autonomous governor or Khazz for the Muslim quarter of Atil, in addition to exploring the possibility of a Muslim-Khazar alliance against the Romans if the former should consistently gain the upper hand in their latest war. However, a few decades ago the situation was the complete opposite, with the Khagans up until (and, for a while, actually including) Bulan being friendly to Christianity and cold toward Islam so long as their old alliance with Rome held. No doubt the present course will find itself reversed if the Khazars ever reconcile with the Romans and begin to work against the Muslims once more.
Isaac Khagan receiving an embassy sent by the Caliph Hussein at the end of the eighth century
As a collective people, the Khazars have not strayed far from the martial traditions of the great Eurasian nomadic hordes – and why should they, when these hordes once brought the Roman world to its knees and actually destroyed the Sassanid Persian Empire. However, while a swarm of swift horse-archers and mighty lancers is indeed a difficult combination to beat on the battlefield even for a powerful settled empire, it is not without its weaknesses. In order to cover said weaknesses, the Khazars have turned to recruiting a diverse array of auxiliaries from subject peoples such as the Antaic Slavs and the Jews, as well as mercenaries from abroad who would be paid with some of the profits from the many riverine and landward trade routes taxed by the Khaganate's authorities.
At the core of the Khazar war machine ride the Khazars themselves, who still fight almost exclusively as horsemen – indeed, most Khazar boys will start learning to ride a horse around the same time that they learn to walk & talk – and will only dismount when they absolutely must, either to traverse difficult terrain into which their horses cannot easily charge through (such as the Pripet Marshes which protect the lands of their former Ruthenian subjects-turned-enemies) or to defend a fixed position of great tactical importance. The princes of the Ashina clan, other aristocratic Khazar families and their retinues who comprise the heavy cavalry corps of the horde make no distinction between the role of 'lancer' and 'horse-archer': suited up in heavy lamellar armor and riding a well-armored steed, these elite warriors fight equally capably with both the great two-handed lance and a compact but powerful composite bow. For sidearms they prefer either maces, with which to crush heavily armored opponents, or curved sabers which excel in carving through an enemy when wielded from atop a horse moving at high speed – a sword design first popularized among the Turkic peoples in late Tegreg times, though the Khazars have increased the curvature of the blade compared to the older Tegreg design and Turks working for the Hashemite army have done much the same, producing the familiar scimitar.
A noble heavy horseman of the Ashina clan, visibly armed with saber and lance and bow. His blade is more curved compared to older steppe sword designs, the better with which to slice through enemies when his horse is moving at full gallop on the battlefield
The highborn Khazars typically exploit their combination of mobility with armor & killing power to gallop up close to the foe, shoot barbed arrows (exceedingly unlikely to directly penetrate Roman mail or scale, but devastating to unarmored soldiers and those parts of armored men's bodies which are insufficiently protected) at them and then retreat, repeating the cycle until the enemy has been so worn out and bloodied (and hopefully also drawn out of formation) that they can safely switch to their lances and charge in to finish the fight. Meanwhile the junior Khazar nobles donning armor made from iron strips & hardened leather laced together, made to maximize protection while still remaining affordable, most frequently fight as lancers supported by poorer retainers, who in turn fight almost exclusively as horse-archers swarming & harassing their foes at a distance and engaging in large-scale feigned retreats to soften up & lure out said enemy for their masters' benefit. The Khazars' Turkic subjects, such as the Barsils and Sabirs, as well as the Magyars employ similar equipment and fighting styles as their overlords, and their contributions to the Khazar armies allow the Khagans to expand the ranks of their cavalry to truly intimidating, even seemingly apocalyptic proportions.
Horsemen are of less use in a siege than they are on an open battlefield, unless the plan is just to camp around a city until its defenders starve (which, to be fair, is usually the easiest and safest way for a besieging force to prevail in a siege). The Khazar Khagans accordingly rely on their settled subjects – Jews, Slavs and Caucasian peoples – to provide them with infantrymen, most frequently to conduct sieges in a timely manner and also to try to pin down opposing Roman or Arab footsoldiers in battle so their masses of cavalry can get at the latter's flanks and rear. The Severians (as the largest Slavic tribe left under even nominal Khazar suzerainty after the Second Roman-Khazar War) typically provide their masters with mobs of lightly-armed tribal spearmen, skirmishers and archers surrounding small squadrons of better-equipped aristocrats and their retinues (Old Slavic: Družina), not the most motivated soldiers but good enough to fill out the ranks of the Khazar infantry so long as they can be kept in line. Caucasian warriors provided by the likes of the Circassian tribes and Alans have a reputation for being both more heavily armored and eager to actually fight in Khazar service than the Severians, but also for being reckless and over-eager to come to grips with the enemy.
It is the Steppe Jews who form one of the most reliable and useful contingents among the Khazar footmen. They may be the most privileged non-Turkic minority within the Khaganate, but in no way does that exempt them from military service – the Ashina Khagans are quick to remind their Jewish subjects that the steppes are a hostile environment for any empire, and that not only should they be grateful that the Khazars took them in, but that it is entirely within their interest to ensure the Khaganate never falls since the next nomadic horde might well pursue less friendly policies toward them. Consequently volunteers and conscripts from the Jewish towns (organized, trained and led by their own elders & captains) furnish the ranks of the Khazar hordes with mailed spearmen, not equal to the Roman legions or Hashemite ghilman but sufficiently disciplined & well-equipped to form the center of a Khazar battle line, or else as light skirmishers outfitted with javelins, bows and slings. However by far the most useful military role occupied by the Steppe Jews is that of engineer: not unlike the role once enjoyed by their Babylonian kindred (until the Muslims learned military engineering in sufficient numbers themselves) the more erudite among the Jews will design and build bridges, covered rams, siege towers and engines of war, from mangonels to Roman-style scorpions to match those used by the empire that expelled their grandfathers, for the benefit of their new masters. Whenever the Khazars succeed in taking a city by storm, it is almost certainly their Jewish engineers who they must thank for the victory.
A highborn Jewish heavy infantryman in Khazar service. His scale armor is of a steppe design, reflecting one of the ways the Khazars have left an influence on their Jewish subjects rather than the other way around
To round out their army, the Khazar Khagans maintain a standing regiment of elite mercenaries set apart from (and many leagues above) the common sellswords augmenting their hordes, financed with the wealth obtained from taxing trade routes. Dubbed the Lariçiyeh or simply 'guardsmen' (Ara.: Arsiyah), these men are recruited primarily from the frontier of Khorasan (or 'Turan'), and as such include a large number of Turks and some Persians (especially Daylamite mountain-men) who have converted to Islam. Heavily armored to a man and divided into foot- and horse-guard units, the Lariçiyeh have been granted the privilege of serving as the personal bodyguard of the Khagans and their immediate family, under the logic that foreigners such as these would be less interested in murdering said Khagan than other Ashina clansmen with an eye on the throne and that if they did kill their patron, the other Khazars would never tolerate their rule and instead tear them to pieces – in other words, the same logic that governs other units of foreign bodyguards, such as the Germanic guard corps employed by past Roman Emperors or the elite ghilman slave-soldiers of the Islamic world. The Ashina Khagans boast that their Lariçiyeh is always around 10,000 strong to intimidate their rivals, but in practice, that number is just their paper strength and as with the legions of Rome it's not uncommon for the Lariçiyeh to count a smaller or larger number of warriors than that in their ranks, depending on the state of the Khagan's treasury.
Like any good nomadic horde, the Khazars thrive on plundering their enemies' lands & subjects and appeasing their own thralls by dividing the spoils among the latter – indeed, rather than paying regular salaries to their troops as the Romans do, Khazar leaders typically just let most of their men basically pay themselves by way of pillage. This practice built up a great hatred for Khazar 'foragers' among their neighbors, especially the Sclaveni to the west (on whose backs the Khazars became the greatest slave-drivers and merchants in western Eurasia for a time, so much so that although the root of the very name 'Slav' is Slověne – 'tribe of the free', derived from svoboda or 'freedom' and further related to the terms slovo ('word') and slava ('glory') – in their ancestral tongue, ironically to many outsiders it is merely the root of the word 'slave'), but it worked well enough until those people started organizing into kingdoms better able to resist Khazar raids under the aegis of Rome and Christianity.
Nowadays, with the number of soft targets for raiding around them dwindling thanks to Roman support for the East Slavs and the expansion of Christianity into the steppes while the Hashemites have recently enjoyed a renaissance under Hashim al-Hakim, the Khazars have had to put more effort into their raids. They could still target the less organized Slavs or Finno-Ugric peoples to the north, but those tend to have little worth stealing. No longer can small, independent bands of nomads just storm into Ruthenian lands or beyond and pillage villages with impunity: these days, such endeavors usually require the Khagan to put together and lead an actual army on an organized expedition to enrich his people (at another's expense). Cruel as it may be, this represents not only the way of the steppe nomad but also the most realistic application of Khazar military power – the Roman-Khazar wars demonstrated that the Khazars have no shot at defeating the stronger Romans (or Arabs for that matter) in an extended war. Bulan Khagan aspired to take over the Roman East in his mother's name, while in his dotage Simon-Sartäç came to harbor even loftier ambitions of first taking Jerusalem from the Saracens, then (after building the Third Temple and being hailed as the Messiah of course) storming westward and leveling Rome to avenge the depredations of Titus & Hadrian: but Isaac Khagan is a much more sensible man who does not trade in such baseless and suicidal fantasies, and can settle just for plundering his enemies' homes when the opportunity arises so as to make his followers happy and keep the Khazars in a position of supremacy on the steppe.
Norse mercenaries turning Slavic slaves they caught on a raid over to their Khazar employers. The latter have found their Khaganate to be a major nexus of the Eurasian slave trade, attracting the bitter enmity of the Slavic neighbors who remain their preferred target
At the core of the Khazar war machine ride the Khazars themselves, who still fight almost exclusively as horsemen – indeed, most Khazar boys will start learning to ride a horse around the same time that they learn to walk & talk – and will only dismount when they absolutely must, either to traverse difficult terrain into which their horses cannot easily charge through (such as the Pripet Marshes which protect the lands of their former Ruthenian subjects-turned-enemies) or to defend a fixed position of great tactical importance. The princes of the Ashina clan, other aristocratic Khazar families and their retinues who comprise the heavy cavalry corps of the horde make no distinction between the role of 'lancer' and 'horse-archer': suited up in heavy lamellar armor and riding a well-armored steed, these elite warriors fight equally capably with both the great two-handed lance and a compact but powerful composite bow. For sidearms they prefer either maces, with which to crush heavily armored opponents, or curved sabers which excel in carving through an enemy when wielded from atop a horse moving at high speed – a sword design first popularized among the Turkic peoples in late Tegreg times, though the Khazars have increased the curvature of the blade compared to the older Tegreg design and Turks working for the Hashemite army have done much the same, producing the familiar scimitar.
A noble heavy horseman of the Ashina clan, visibly armed with saber and lance and bow. His blade is more curved compared to older steppe sword designs, the better with which to slice through enemies when his horse is moving at full gallop on the battlefield
The highborn Khazars typically exploit their combination of mobility with armor & killing power to gallop up close to the foe, shoot barbed arrows (exceedingly unlikely to directly penetrate Roman mail or scale, but devastating to unarmored soldiers and those parts of armored men's bodies which are insufficiently protected) at them and then retreat, repeating the cycle until the enemy has been so worn out and bloodied (and hopefully also drawn out of formation) that they can safely switch to their lances and charge in to finish the fight. Meanwhile the junior Khazar nobles donning armor made from iron strips & hardened leather laced together, made to maximize protection while still remaining affordable, most frequently fight as lancers supported by poorer retainers, who in turn fight almost exclusively as horse-archers swarming & harassing their foes at a distance and engaging in large-scale feigned retreats to soften up & lure out said enemy for their masters' benefit. The Khazars' Turkic subjects, such as the Barsils and Sabirs, as well as the Magyars employ similar equipment and fighting styles as their overlords, and their contributions to the Khazar armies allow the Khagans to expand the ranks of their cavalry to truly intimidating, even seemingly apocalyptic proportions.
Horsemen are of less use in a siege than they are on an open battlefield, unless the plan is just to camp around a city until its defenders starve (which, to be fair, is usually the easiest and safest way for a besieging force to prevail in a siege). The Khazar Khagans accordingly rely on their settled subjects – Jews, Slavs and Caucasian peoples – to provide them with infantrymen, most frequently to conduct sieges in a timely manner and also to try to pin down opposing Roman or Arab footsoldiers in battle so their masses of cavalry can get at the latter's flanks and rear. The Severians (as the largest Slavic tribe left under even nominal Khazar suzerainty after the Second Roman-Khazar War) typically provide their masters with mobs of lightly-armed tribal spearmen, skirmishers and archers surrounding small squadrons of better-equipped aristocrats and their retinues (Old Slavic: Družina), not the most motivated soldiers but good enough to fill out the ranks of the Khazar infantry so long as they can be kept in line. Caucasian warriors provided by the likes of the Circassian tribes and Alans have a reputation for being both more heavily armored and eager to actually fight in Khazar service than the Severians, but also for being reckless and over-eager to come to grips with the enemy.
It is the Steppe Jews who form one of the most reliable and useful contingents among the Khazar footmen. They may be the most privileged non-Turkic minority within the Khaganate, but in no way does that exempt them from military service – the Ashina Khagans are quick to remind their Jewish subjects that the steppes are a hostile environment for any empire, and that not only should they be grateful that the Khazars took them in, but that it is entirely within their interest to ensure the Khaganate never falls since the next nomadic horde might well pursue less friendly policies toward them. Consequently volunteers and conscripts from the Jewish towns (organized, trained and led by their own elders & captains) furnish the ranks of the Khazar hordes with mailed spearmen, not equal to the Roman legions or Hashemite ghilman but sufficiently disciplined & well-equipped to form the center of a Khazar battle line, or else as light skirmishers outfitted with javelins, bows and slings. However by far the most useful military role occupied by the Steppe Jews is that of engineer: not unlike the role once enjoyed by their Babylonian kindred (until the Muslims learned military engineering in sufficient numbers themselves) the more erudite among the Jews will design and build bridges, covered rams, siege towers and engines of war, from mangonels to Roman-style scorpions to match those used by the empire that expelled their grandfathers, for the benefit of their new masters. Whenever the Khazars succeed in taking a city by storm, it is almost certainly their Jewish engineers who they must thank for the victory.
A highborn Jewish heavy infantryman in Khazar service. His scale armor is of a steppe design, reflecting one of the ways the Khazars have left an influence on their Jewish subjects rather than the other way around
To round out their army, the Khazar Khagans maintain a standing regiment of elite mercenaries set apart from (and many leagues above) the common sellswords augmenting their hordes, financed with the wealth obtained from taxing trade routes. Dubbed the Lariçiyeh or simply 'guardsmen' (Ara.: Arsiyah), these men are recruited primarily from the frontier of Khorasan (or 'Turan'), and as such include a large number of Turks and some Persians (especially Daylamite mountain-men) who have converted to Islam. Heavily armored to a man and divided into foot- and horse-guard units, the Lariçiyeh have been granted the privilege of serving as the personal bodyguard of the Khagans and their immediate family, under the logic that foreigners such as these would be less interested in murdering said Khagan than other Ashina clansmen with an eye on the throne and that if they did kill their patron, the other Khazars would never tolerate their rule and instead tear them to pieces – in other words, the same logic that governs other units of foreign bodyguards, such as the Germanic guard corps employed by past Roman Emperors or the elite ghilman slave-soldiers of the Islamic world. The Ashina Khagans boast that their Lariçiyeh is always around 10,000 strong to intimidate their rivals, but in practice, that number is just their paper strength and as with the legions of Rome it's not uncommon for the Lariçiyeh to count a smaller or larger number of warriors than that in their ranks, depending on the state of the Khagan's treasury.
Like any good nomadic horde, the Khazars thrive on plundering their enemies' lands & subjects and appeasing their own thralls by dividing the spoils among the latter – indeed, rather than paying regular salaries to their troops as the Romans do, Khazar leaders typically just let most of their men basically pay themselves by way of pillage. This practice built up a great hatred for Khazar 'foragers' among their neighbors, especially the Sclaveni to the west (on whose backs the Khazars became the greatest slave-drivers and merchants in western Eurasia for a time, so much so that although the root of the very name 'Slav' is Slověne – 'tribe of the free', derived from svoboda or 'freedom' and further related to the terms slovo ('word') and slava ('glory') – in their ancestral tongue, ironically to many outsiders it is merely the root of the word 'slave'), but it worked well enough until those people started organizing into kingdoms better able to resist Khazar raids under the aegis of Rome and Christianity.
Nowadays, with the number of soft targets for raiding around them dwindling thanks to Roman support for the East Slavs and the expansion of Christianity into the steppes while the Hashemites have recently enjoyed a renaissance under Hashim al-Hakim, the Khazars have had to put more effort into their raids. They could still target the less organized Slavs or Finno-Ugric peoples to the north, but those tend to have little worth stealing. No longer can small, independent bands of nomads just storm into Ruthenian lands or beyond and pillage villages with impunity: these days, such endeavors usually require the Khagan to put together and lead an actual army on an organized expedition to enrich his people (at another's expense). Cruel as it may be, this represents not only the way of the steppe nomad but also the most realistic application of Khazar military power – the Roman-Khazar wars demonstrated that the Khazars have no shot at defeating the stronger Romans (or Arabs for that matter) in an extended war. Bulan Khagan aspired to take over the Roman East in his mother's name, while in his dotage Simon-Sartäç came to harbor even loftier ambitions of first taking Jerusalem from the Saracens, then (after building the Third Temple and being hailed as the Messiah of course) storming westward and leveling Rome to avenge the depredations of Titus & Hadrian: but Isaac Khagan is a much more sensible man who does not trade in such baseless and suicidal fantasies, and can settle just for plundering his enemies' homes when the opportunity arises so as to make his followers happy and keep the Khazars in a position of supremacy on the steppe.
Norse mercenaries turning Slavic slaves they caught on a raid over to their Khazar employers. The latter have found their Khaganate to be a major nexus of the Eurasian slave trade, attracting the bitter enmity of the Slavic neighbors who remain their preferred target
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[1] Old Hungarian.
[2] Historically the Khazars were known to have a dual kingship system going at first, but abandoned it sometime before the 9th-10th centuries, as evidenced by the later Khazar monarchs with Jewish names no longer making any reference to co-rulers in their correspondence.
Red_Tornado
Well-known member
Good piece of work🙉
801-805: Old Foes, New Century
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
With the latest round of Roman-Arab hostilities now in full swing, the two empires spent the start of the new century pushing the other back and forth. Backed by his array of Greek & Caucasian cousins & in-laws, Constantine VII mounted a counterattack outward from Antioch in pursuit of the retreating Muslim army, which eventually turned and gave battle on the plain of Zerdana. Having learned of his limitations from his first thrashing at Ariha two years prior, the Augustus Imperator gave command of his army to his more experienced Rhangabe cousins, who used the flat terrain around the town and their preponderance of heavy cavalry to their advantage. The engagement which followed was a hard-fought one, but it was ultimately decided by the victory of the Roman paladins, cataphracts and their mounted auxiliaries over the Islamic ghilman and supporting horsemen. As it became clear that the Christians were about to win the day Burhan al-Din committed the Muslim reserve to hold back the surging Roman forces, and Caliph Hussein actually did something useful by keeping his men's spirits up during the retreat, thus preventing a rout and a total Islamic defeat.
The Battle of Zardana had been the biggest land battle fought between the Romans and Arabs this year, and it set the stage for the Romans to slowly claw back additional ground around Antioch as far as Athareb[1] over a course of skirmishes and small sieges. Burhan al-Din, for his part, resisted his overlord's demand that he launch his own counterattack immediately in favor of avoiding pitched battle for the rest of 801 and waiting for additional reinforcements from Iraq, Filastin and Arabia instead. The Muslims didn't have much success in cracking the besieged fortresses of Nisibis and Dara to the east either, although at the recommendation of his mentor, Ala ud-Din did detach lighter elements of his army to begin harassing Corduene and southern Armenia in an attempt to divert the Armenian division of Constantine's army back toward their homeland. To that end he also established a large secondary camp around a river crossing near the ruins of long-gone Bezabde to serve as this detachment's forward-base, and the encampment would eventually grow into an Islamic town under the name of Jazirat ibn Ala-ud-Din[2] ('island of Ala-ud-Din') after himself.
While Roman success on land had been limited, the same could not be said of their success at sea, where the Italian fleet finally sailed forth to avenge the disaster off Seleucia Pieria from two years prior. Commanded by the Venetian lord Domenico Candiano (the most senior of Doge Gioviano Galbaio's sons-in-law and thus a brother by marriage to Orso Galbaio) and reinforced by an additional Constantinopolitan squadron, the Roman navy once more engaged Al-Walid ibn Abd Shams in the waters off Paphos late in 801 and this time won a resounding victory over the Arabic fleet – certainly it helped that this time, they were led by an admiral who actually knew what he was doing. The Muslim sailors did give a good account of themselves, but were ultimately defeated after their left squadron was overwhelmed by the Venetian galleys and Al-Walid's own flagship was burned to ash by Greek fire-throwers (although Al-Walid himself actually managed to escape in a lifeboat almost immediately after realizing his ship was aflame, this loss crippled the morale of his fleet). As the Arabs ended up retreating in disarray and amid great bloodshed, the Battle of Paphos also cleared the way for the Romans to retake Cyprus from the Caliphate, a task in which Leontios Rhangabe volunteered himself in a bid to remove the disgrace of Seleucia Pieria from his name.
Al-Walid's flagship is set ablaze at the climax of the Battle off Paphos
In China, the Liang and True Han were both busy consolidating their positions and rebuilding their lands after the devastation of the early Horse and Lotus Era. This was even reflected in the era names adopted by Huanzong and Dezu around this period – since hostilities had ended (and until they should begin again, either with each other or one of the contentious barbarians around them), Huanzong had in life adopted the era name 'Xianyi' or 'establishing justice', while Dezu took on the name 'Jianwen' or 'establishing civility'. Keenly aware that his red hair and the Turkic origins of his family left him with a good deal of ground to cover when it came to positive public relations, Huanzong sought to stress just how Sinicized he was (and had been since birth) and to secure the good graces of the ancient Chinese noble families of distinction, in large part by involving them in his government. His most notable appointment was that of Kong Qilong, the incumbent Marquis Shaosheng – the patriarch of the Kong clan and direct descendant of the great sage Confucius himself in the senior male line, in Qilong's case being from the 37th generation of descent – as his peacetime Grand Chancellor, and also elevating the ancestral dignity of the Kong clan to the rank of 'Duke Wenxuan'.
Since most of the notable Chinese aristocratic clans lived north of the Yangtze, Dezu did not have a similar option available to him and resolved to instead greatly increase the ranks of his own scholarly elite by reforming & expanding the imperial examination system. He opened the system to commoners and lesser gentry previously locked out by the background limitations of the Later Han soon after Emperor Yang's reign; ordered the names of examinees be hidden from their examiners to reduce the chance that latter's judgment might be tainted with bias (in either a positive or negative direction); and formalized testing on the prefectural (for jobs in the rural counties), metropolitan (for work in the cities) and palatial (for the highest-level government appointments) levels. Being a scion of a family of scholar-gentry himself, Dezu also set the trend of Emperors supervising the palatial examinations in person. In this manner the True Han offered greater social mobility (even to people of northern origin) than the Liang did, and also laid the groundwork for a new bureaucratic & intellectual elite to arise south of the Yangtze.
A palace examination candidate hands his work in to Dezu's aide, hoping he's done well enough to join the growing ranks of Southern China's new bureaucratic elite
Far away from the civilized lands, across the sea in Annún the Briton Pilgrims came into their first serious religious conflict with some of their Wilderman subjects, at this time still oblivious to the growing might of Dakaruniku far to their south. Now the Uendage had a habit of torturing and feasting on prisoners from a hostile tribe, starting by roasting and dividing the heart between their warriors if the foeman had previously shown courage[3], and this tradition was one that was obviously found horrifying and unacceptable by their British overlords, on top of jeopardizing Pilgrim relations with peoples hitherto uncontacted. Worse still in the eyes of the Britons, unlike the Anicinébe the Uendage's practice of cannibalism did not even seem justified by necessity, since their lands were considerably warmer and more fertile than those of their northwestern neighbors. King Brén (Old Brit.: 'Brwyn') interfered with one such sacrificial ceremony in summer of this year, preventing the Uendage from killing and eating captives from the 'Ínodouagé'[4] tribe which they'd taken in a raid across Lake Branoíne: said captives were taken into British custody and eventually recruited as interpreters in the royal court's service in order to contact their tribe at a later date.
Brén's nominal vassals were unamused at his intervention, and the affected tribes raised the standard of revolt because as far as they could tell, the Rí had violated their sacred customs for no good reason and set their enemies free when they could've and should've eaten the latter for strength instead. However, Brén was prepared for this eventuality and cracked down hard, leading his small quantity of knights and slightly larger quantity of British longbowmen – supported by a mass of loyal Anicinébe warriors – to suppress the Uendage rebellion by the end of the year. As a consequence of their defeat, more Uendage were compelled to undergo baptism, outlaw the tradition of cannibalizing their captives (though in practice it probably still went on, just underground and in greater secrecy, for at least a few more generations) and reaffirm their allegiance to the Pilgrim Kings, who in turn built more churches & monasteries in their lands and won the right to install priests as supervisors in their councils. In practical terms, not only was King Brén able to pull off a genuine humanitarian intervention in the affairs of one of his vassals, but in so doing he also successfully centralized greater authority over the Wildermen in the hands of his dynasty; further expanded the reach of Christianity among the former; and removed an avenue for his vassals to drag him into war with tribes he hadn't even known existed until recently.
In 802, the Syrian front stabilized as the Romans' efforts to push the Arabs further back this year stalled, while a reinforced Arab counter-counterattack got going in the spring and showed promise for a few weeks before being reversed by the efforts of the Rhangabe brothers at the Battle of Hazir[5] where though the Muslim cavalry initially drove their counterpart away, they proved incapable of resisting the temptation to loot the Roman camp before the engagement was actually won – almost needless to say, this breakdown in discipline cost Burhan al-Din the victory, as the Roman infantry under Count Herakleios went on to vanquish his own footmen and Duke Elpidios rallied the cavalrymen to surprise and rout his distracted horsemen later. After it became clear that the Syrian front wouldn't be budging much in either direction, Constantine dispatched Herakleios to relieve the sieges of Dara and Nisibis, which the latter did by the end of the year.
Other fronts proved more fluid. With Al-Walid's fleet now being the one to limp back to Alexandria in defeat and in no condition to contest the eastern Mediterranean anytime soon, the way was clear for the last and least of the Rhangabes to try to redeem himself, and to that end Count Leontios was furnished with two thousand marines (milites muscularii) on top of three times that number in other soldiers, mostly Italian legionaries and Bulgar or Slavic auxiliaries, for his Cypriot expedition. Ferried by the Italic fleet and supported in their landing by armed Italian sailors, Leontios successfully drove Abu al-Abbas' defending force away from the beach of Famagusta, a fishing village which was now growing swollen with refugees from nearby Salamis since the Arabs sacked it for not surrendering quickly enough to them (and to intimidate the rest of the island into yielding).
Since naval battles were still chiefly decided by boarding actions, and spearheading amphibious invasions wasn't a pleasant experience either, Roman marines or 'milites muscularii' ('muscular soldiers') tended to be as well-armored as regular legionaries in spite of the obvious hazards that wearing heavy armor into battle on the high seas poses, making them formidable fighters on ships & beaches alike
Now with that done and a base of operations established at Famagusta itself, Leontios continued to take the fight to his adversary and met the remaining Arab army on the island west of Salamis proper. Having been blockaded for a year by Candiano's fleet since the Battle off Paphos, the Arabs had run low on supplies and turned to pillaging even Greek towns which had surrendered to them, and those angry Cypriots had since gone on to reinforce the Roman reclamation force to a point where it comfortably outnumbered the Arab host. Fueled by desperation and more capably led by Abu al-Abbas, the Arabs fought with the ferocity of cornered lions and nearly won the day after breaking through Leontios' front line, but his Cypriot militia – poorly equipped and trained warriors certainly, but enthusiastic and numerous enough to make up for their deficiencies – plugged the gap long enough for their betters to turn the tide. By the year's end, Abu al-Abbas was stuck in the northern mountains of Cyprus and since rescue didn't seem to be coming anytime soon, although the vengeful Greeks' massacre of those among his men who tried to surrender at the denouement of the Battle of Salamis strongly inclined him to do otherwise, necessity compelled him to open negotiations with the Romans.
Africa seemed the most promising front for the Muslims this year, as Husam al-Din exchanged blows with the Dominus Rex Bãdalaréu across Libya for much of 802. The Islamic army in Cyrenaica was bolstered by the soldiers originally assigned to the Cretan expedition, which certainly wasn't going to happen now with the Romans having retaken control of the high seas anyway, and following an initial setback at the Battle of Anabucis[6] they quickly regained their footing and handed Bãdalaréu defeats of his own at Corniclanum[7] (a battle which Husam couldn't afford to lose in the first place, since he was defending a major water supply for his men there) and Oea, pushing the Moors all the way back to Tubagdés[8]. Even here however, it did not seem likely that the Saracens would hold their gains for long, as additional reinforcements were assembled on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules – the Goths were loath to make significant contributions toward the rescue of their African rivals, nevermind that Bãdalaréu was also their king Alarico III's brother-in-law, so it fell to the Celtiberians and the Hispano-Romans of the northeast to make up for the difference, led by Count Adriano (Lat.: 'Hadrianus') of Barcelona (who, as a descendant of Aloysius Gloriosus' eldest bastard son Sauromates, was a distant relative of Emperor Constantine VII). This relief force made its way over the straits and moved to bolster Bãdalaréu's ranks by the end of the year.
With his campaigns on all fronts either stalling or even facing small reverses in the big picture, Hussein resolved to try to tip the scales by getting the Khazars involved on his side. For some time now the Caliph had been cultivating more positive ties with the former Khazar enemy to his north, and in 802 his efforts seemed to finally bear some fruit as Isaac Khagan agreed to create the special office of Khazz – an autonomous governor for the growing community of Islamic expatriates in his capital – in addition to granting Muslim merchants trading privileges which were denied to their Roman counterparts. Unfortunately for him, the new Khagan was also exactly the opposite of the sort of ruler who would rush headlong into a foreign entanglement, having learned the importance of a cautious and temperate foreign policy from the disastrous mistakes of his forebears. Isaac made it clear that although he was fine with drawing closer to the Muslims to an extent, he would not commit to attacking the Romans' northern flank unless the Muslims started winning decisively on the battlefield, lest he end up on the losing side (or worse, if things started out well but then went south, the Caliphate might sell him out to save their own hide).
Hussein reads a letter from his ambassador to the court of Isaac Khagan, reporting on the latter's willingness to grant special privileges to the Muslim expatriates on the steppes but also his reluctance to open a northern front against their common Roman adversary
Far removed from the affairs of the Abrahamic empires, a Viking party was known to arrive in the islands of Fearann[9] for the first time in 802. There, as had been the case with the former Orcades, a minuscule community of Irish monks and villagers already existed, the latter having serviced sailors bound for Paparia and ultimately Aloysiana for many years now. For once the Norsemen did not come in hostility – not at first – but rather as traders and settlers, building their own village away from the preexisting Irish town that they found. However this peaceable state of affairs did not last long, as once the Nordic settlement grew large enough some years later, its increasingly greedy and warlike inhabitants began to harass the Irishmen and demand tribute from them. Rather than pay and forever live at the mercy of Viking bullies, the Irish of Fearann eventually went home or to the New World, leaving only scant traces of their settlement and their name for the islands: in the tongue of the Norsemen, Fearann eventually became Føroyar, or simply the 'Faroe Islands'.
Come 803, the Roman-Arab war started to seesaw in the latter's favor again, at least on its primary Syro-Mesopotamian front. With Dara and Nisibis secure for the time being, Count Herakleios and the Ghassanids attempted to counterattack toward Singara, but Ala ud-Din had put much work into consolidating Islam's hold on that area so as to better protect the approach to Mosul and ultimately inflicted a costly defeat on the returning Roman forces in the nine-month Sinjar Mountains Campaign. On a similar note, although Burhan al-Din never undertook any attacks of his own in the direction of Antioch at this time, he was able to turn back all attempts by Emperor Constantine and Duke Elpidios to make any significant advance into Islamic Syria this year, culminating in his suppression of a Roman offensive which sought to circumvent his western flank at the Battle of Seleucobelus[10] where he also captured Count Maisemin. Further straining Constantine himself, his longtime mistress Marcelle de Convelence died from a wasting illness in the early winter of this year, and yet despite his grief the demands of the ongoing war and the need to rescue their son from Muslim captivity prevented him from returning home to attend her funeral.
Hussein repeated his appeal to Atil on the basis of these Islamic victories, and while his arguments did not wholly win Isaac Khagan over, the latter was persuaded to at least begin raiding the edges of the Roman world. Khazar marauders pillaged Georgia, eastern Armenia, Ruthenia and Dacia with varying success in the later months of 803, with the parties operating out of Balanjar & the North Caucasus in particular sacking several wealthy Armenian monasteries and their attached villages. While hardly a true conquering expedition, these attacks to herald one to the Roman court in addition to pressuring Constantine's northern flank – the Caucasians now demanded that they be released from the main Roman armies so they could go and defend their homelands, and the Augustus Imperator sought quick victories on other fronts to both shore up his position & dissuade Isaac from attacking.
Khazar raiders moving through the Caucasus Mountains
Fortunately for the Romans, they did not have to wait long for such victories to come trickling in. The forces of Christendom achieved two triumphs over those of Islam, whose significance could not be easily ignored, near the end of 803: first and most easily achieved, they retook Cyprus in its entirety by negotiating the surrender of Abu al-Abbas' army. Twice the talks broke down and Count Leontios had tried to invade the Arab positions in the Pentadaktylos[11] range, but on both occasions he was unsuccessful at rooting the Saracens out of such difficult terrain, so ultimately Abu al-Abbas was able to secure his extraction from the island by way of Al-Walid's remaining ships near the end of the year. By that point, more than half of the Islamic expedition which had invaded & briefly conquered Cyprus was dead or missing (and probably dead, given the opprobrium they had incurred with the locals during their stay) – out of 10,000 men, fewer than 4,000 ended up making it back to 'Akka by sea. Leontios was specifically ordered not to attack the Muslims as they left their positions since the Muslims' end of this agreement involved having to release Maisemin & a similar number of Roman prisoners-of-war from captivity, and Constantine certainly wasn't about to jeopardize the life of one of the reminders he still had of his late love.
The second significant Roman victory this year was achieved in Africa, as Count Adriano's army arrived to join that of Bãdalaréu in Gardàgénu. They did so just in time for by the moment of their arrival, the Arabs were laying siege to Tubagdés, which was the second-to-last stop after Lepcés Magna and before Gardàgénu itself. In the face of this large relief force incoming from the northwest, Husam al-Din withdrew to Torghae[12] to the south, where he decided to give battle to the Romans. Six days of skirmishing and harassment preceded the actual engagement itself, where the Moorish light cavalry executed a feigned retreat of their own which got the Arabs to repeatedly charge their well-ordered and disciplined heavy infantry formations: of course, these attacks were mounted to no avail. At a critical juncture late on that seventh day, Husam was in the middle of repositioning his forces to try to break the Roman left wing, which Bãdalaréu and Adriano had made out to be the weakest link of their army, when the bulk of the Romans' own cavalry surged forth to attack his left.
A panicked rout ensued, starting on the Arab left wing and rippling outward, and the Muslims were forced off the field in disarray. By the year's end, the Romans had pushed the Libyan front back to Oea, thereby recapturing much of central Libya from the Saracens. Ironically, although King Alarico had held his only legitimate son Fruela (Got.: 'Froila') back (instead assigning command of the meager contingent he contributed to Adriano's army to Count Teodofredo of Cordoba, a distant Balthing cousin) precisely so that the Visigothic heir wouldn't be risking his life against the Arabs, the teenage prince of the Goths died anyway about a week after news of the great Roman victory at the Battle of Torghae broke, as his horse was spooked by a thunderbolt and threw him from its saddle while he was returning early from a hunting trip on account of the heavy autumn rain. Since Alarico's daughters were married to Adriano himself and the Celtiberian prince Viridomaro, heir to the incumbent Astur-Galician king Vismaro III, this tragedy set up a ruinous succession crisis for the oldest federate kingdom, though there were still some years to go before that dire consequence would be felt.
African and Hispano-Roman troops reaching the Arab camp after routing the latter from the battlefield of Torghae
Now near the end of 803, the Romans had turned the tide hard enough on most of the war's fronts to dissuade Isaac Khagan from escalating to full intervention, just as Constantine had hoped: but this was seen as no reason to not go ahead with their own plans to swing a prospective ally of their own, the Nubians, into the conflict. A Roman embassy carefully made its way to this long-isolated outpost of African Christianity to try to induce King Chael to attack the Arabs' southern flank while they were being pressed hard on other fronts. Chael had been reluctant to join the fray or even to cease paying tribute to the Caliphate, since one severe defeat at Saracen hands would surely end his kingdom (itself stitched together from the Nubians and Aksumites/Ethiopians who had managed to survive up to this point), but the drive to regain port access for his long-weakened and impoverished people and news of the major Roman victory at Torghae gave him the nerve to go ahead. Unfortunately for Hussein, the Nubians were not as skittish about committing to their chosen ally's side in full as the Khazars had been and Chael would soon lead his warriors on a campaign to drive Islam from the old Aksumite highlands and also to regain a coastline.
Since 803 had been a fairly good year for the Romans, the Arabs spent 804 on the defensive on all fronts, though this proved to be easier for them than attacking (again) and even though the Khazars did not directly enter the war on their behalf, the latter did still indirectly help them. Constantine had to let the Armenian and Georgian contingents of his army go home after an especially large Khazar raiding force of 5,000 men under Isaac's eldest son, Gideon Tarkhan, penetrated into the Armenian core and had to be bribed into going home by his eldest daughter Hilaria (now Armenia's queen) before they could make good on their threats to attack that kingdom's spiritual & political capitals at Etchmiadzin and Dvin, respectively. Without the Caucasians, the scheduled Roman attack on Idlib this year was doomed to failure, though by reuniting the Rhangabe brothers, scrapping a similarly-doomed second expedition to Sinjar and diverting troops from both Cyprus & Ghassanid Mesopotamia, the Augustus Imperator and Duke Elpidios found they had strength enough to repel Burhan's own offensive at the Second Battle of Athareb.
The Muslims initially dispatched reinforcements to Africa to bolster their new southern front with the Nubians, but Husam was able to persuade the Caliph that he needed these men first to hold back the Africans and other Roman allies in Libya. Now by the time these redirected men linked up with Husam's command at Derna (still 'Darnis' to the Romans) early in this year, Bãdalaréu and Adriano had already pushed into Cyrenaica and captured Benghazi/Berenice, but the newly-bolstered Husam immediately went on the counteroffensive and defeated the Roman army at the Battle of Barqa[13] (Lat.: 'Barca'). The Saracens expelled the Romans from Cyrenaica over the next few months, but had to also halt their attacks firstly because the Africans rallied and defeated them at the Second Battle of Arae Philaenorum, and secondly to finally deal with the Nubian offensive far to the south.
Chael had the benefit of attacking the Caliphate at a weak point when they were still too busy on other fronts to significantly shore up their defenses, and thus managed to drive Muslim forces from much of the central and southern Abyssinian Highlands with little trouble in the first half of 804. However, the Nubians ran into trouble once they started moving into the more heavily Islamized lands closer to the coast. Bypassing the ruins of Aksum itself, Chael had to fight harder for the lowland territories lying by the Gulf of Zula, and was still in the middle of besieging the port city of Adulis when Husam al-Din's vanguard descended upon his northern flank late in the year. The resulting battle was a defeat for the Nubians, who had to fall back into the mountains in a hurry to avoid annihilation while the Arab cavalry harrassed them. Once they completed their retreat however, the Nubians were able to use the more favorable highland terrain and the support of the remaining Aksumite Christians to defeat their pursuers at the Battle of Wasal[14].
Chael's Nubian warriors enjoy their brief stay on the Red Sea's beaches shortly before being driven back inland by the Arabs
At this point Hussein appeared to have had enough, having made incremental gains in Syria and Antioch which were then offset with losses in North and East Africa. Stronger-than-expected resistance on the part of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who had since proven to be a less able leader than his father but still not a man to be underestimated, and the failure of a full alliance with Khazaria to materialize had proven to be great disappointments indeed to the Caliph. However, Constantine himself was running out of steam – the first bad year of this war had stacked up Roman losses which he was clearly unable of completely reversing, having only managed to stem his losses in the Levant while his vassals made ultimately-modest gains in Libya. His Nubian ally similarly hadn't exactly turned out to be a tide-changing war-winner, although they had managed to secure a more defensible position for themselves in the highlands of old Aksum. With that in mind, when Hussein sued for peace near the end of 804, Constantine agreed to a ceasefire and to begin negotiating an end to their conflict.
It was also around this time that a notable community of Ionian Christians took root in the marshy wetlands of southern Mesopotamia, where their Hashemite persecutors found it difficult to follow them. Here they ingratiated themselves with the local marsh tribes or Ma'dan, who were at the time mostly known for living in reed houses called mudhifs and tending to herds of water buffaloes, and spread the faith among these locals who were isolated from (and, when interacted with, oft-regarded with some contempt as swamp-dwelling hicks by) the other Arabs. Other underground Ionians of the Babylonian Rite (not necessarily, but often, the ones who had retreated to their new marshland sanctuaries) reached out to the zanj slaves, among whom the Gospel proved a popular source of hope since their life under the Islamic lash was almost assuredly a short and brutish one. It would be some time still before Christianity built up enough of a critical mass among these peoples to seriously upset the power of the Caliphate, but that was probably for the best (for Christendom) – Constantine VII was not the right man to take advantage of such an opportunity anyway.
Zanj slaves living on the outskirts of the great Mesopotamian marshes give thanks to the Most High God and His Son, away from the eyes of their masters at camp and closer to the Babylonian Christians who enlightened them to the Gospel
On the opposite fringe of the Roman world away from Nubia, the Vikings launched their first major attacks out of the Orkney Islands this year, all targeting the Gaelic lands. Reavers laid waste to large parts of the kingdom of Dál Riata, establishing additional outposts & villages in the Hebrides as they went, and also pillaged the Irish coast as far south as the isle of Reachrainn[15] and as far west as Sligeach[16] in the lands of the Connachta. The Norse benefited greatly from disunity and endemic warfare among the Gaels: the Dál Riatans were at this time warring with the Dál Fiatach kings of Ulaid, hence why they had scant warriors left to defend their homes when the Viking longships turned up, and the Irish petty-kings who were not immediately targeted by these raids would more often than not actually opt to recruit Norsemen as mercenaries in their feuds with their neighbors – including the nominal High King at the time, Cenn mac Loingsech from Tír Eoghain, who believed these Norse sellswords represented an opportunity for him to restore Uí Néill hegemony over northern Ireland and eventually extend it to the south. The Vikings who took up this offer and similar others, of course, were content to let their employers believe whatever they wanted to believe and not to reveal the folly of this decision until it was too late for the Irish to do anything about it.
The Romans and Saracens spent much of 805 in a state of very uneasy truce around the bargaining table, trying to hash out peace terms to end their latest round of hostilities. The truce was riddled with low-intensity skirmishing and even outright broken twice however, once by each rival empire in a bid for last-minute gains & to strengthen their negotiating position – the Rhangabe brothers attempted an ill-advised attack on Phoenicia by both land and sea, while Burhan al-Din and Ala ud-Din launched a final broad offensive in Syria and what remained of Ghassanid Mesopotamia but floundered on both counts – and restored soon afterward, since prolonging the fighting too much was in neither's interest. Ultimately it took the Augustus Imperator and his Islamic counterpart until December to find a mutually acceptable settlement.
By the terms of the Peace of Samosata, the borders were frozen where they were at the end of overt large-scale hostilities, with a territorial exchange of sorts taking place between the Holy Roman Empire and the Caliphate. Hussein made some modest gains in Syria toward his intended goal of Antioch, mostly centered around Duhulabum/Idlib which he would waste no time in converting into a major forward-base for whenever the Muslims should strike at the fourth Heptarchic seat again, and less modest ones in Mesopotamia, where he severely truncated the Ghassanid realm and managed to remove the dagger pointed downward to the heart of his domain by way of the Ghassanids' former control of Sinjar and its environs. This peace was more favorable to the Stilichians than to the Aloysians themselves, since the former regained much of central Libya.
Outside of Roman borders, the Nubians also held on to their defensible buffer in the Abyssinian Highlands, and while they couldn't regain a shoreline, the Muslims agreed to reopen their Red Sea ports to Nubian trade and to exempt Nubian merchants from tariffs for ten years. The Caliph also relaxed his campaign of persecution against the Babylonian Christians, for now – not a small number of their ilk proved wise enough to not emerge from the southern Mesopotamian marshes or their hiding holes near slave barracks and other places of disrepute, in case this relief should prove short-lived. Finally, Hussein agreed to recognize Raphael Qaṭraya as the legitimate Patriarch of Babylon, thereby allowing him to actually assume his office, and to once more acknowledge Constantine's authority to appoint new Patriarchs in Jerusalem & Alexandria as well in exchange for a lump sum payment.
Now it seemed that events had turned out reasonably well for Emperor Constantine and the Romans. They did lose some territory, but it was balanced out by gains elsewhere and none of it immediately fatal or even seemingly significant on a map – there was still a defensive buffer zone around Antioch, albeit one more truncated than before, and their Ghassanid federates still held the formidable fortresses of Dara and Nisibis once used to withstand the Persians, which had since proven their worth against the Saracens time & again. It seemed that like with the Sassanids, the Romans & Arabs had settled into a cycle of wars around difficult-to-adjust borders. Constantine himself also gained valuable warfighting experience, his lack of which had proven a serious detriment at the start of hostilities. Unfortunately, it was at this point that the Augustus Imperator stumbled into a problem many past Emperors were familiar with: the legions being dissatisfied with their pay. Although he did actually pay out boni (bonuses) to his veterans as was customary at the conclusion of a war, some among the Antiochene legions believed that their deeds were worth more and that he was holding out on them. Alas, they were complaining to one nicknamed 'the Miser', who further had the death of his lover still weighing on his mind. Constantine thus reacted poorly to what he perceived to be the arrogant demands of greedy and entitled soldiers, adamant in his belief that he had paid them their fair due and they should be content with it – they were at his service and not he at theirs, as he would put it.
Constantine VII rebuking a legionary captain for demanding more money after the war with the Arabs, even though the Emperor just paid him his bonus and also had to pay Hussein more gold to regain his authority to appoint new Ionian Patriarchs on Islamic soil
Up north, the Dál Riatan king Connad mac Máel Dúin took a break from fighting the Irishmen of Ulaid to see to his own kingdom's defense against the new pagan interlopers from the north and east. Though his warriors may have been bloodied and their ranks somewhat depleted from those earlier hostilities, they still proved sufficient to catch and brutally execute Viking parties which had tried to raid around Iona and his own capital of Dunadd[17], leaving their corpses staked out on his beaches as a warning to their compatriots to stay away. To Connad's astonishment however, far from being intimidated by this display of savage Celtic justice, the Vikings retaliated in kind: the Orcadian jarl (Norse for 'chieftain') Røgnvaldr Godfriðson declared that he would go to war to avenge his fallen men, whose ranks included a cousin and brother of his, and promised much land, riches and women to any who would follow him on this campaign of vengeance. For the first time but certainly not the last or even the biggest, a British ruler had mnaged to turn Viking raids into a real invasion of his realm.
Røgnvaldr found his 500 volunteers (mostly Norsemen from home, not his fellow Orcadians) in short order and resoundingly defeated the outnumbered Dál Riatans in two large (by the standards of the far northern islets around Britannia, anyway) battles, one beneath a rocky outcrop called the Storr[18] and the other at a site which will be named Totronald (Gaelic: Tobhta Raghnaill) after him on the island called Coll, in-between many smaller raids and skirmishes at sea. The jarl personally killed the rival king at the Battle of Tobhta Raghnaill, where Connad absolutely refused to surrender since he knew the Vikings would subject him to a torturous death after what he did to their kin: since there wasn't much point to blood-eagling a corpse, Røgnvaldr cut him into bait for the fishes instead before going on to sack Dunadd. Unfortunately it turned out Dál Riata had little in the way of anything to offer the Vikings, but Røgnvaldr did reduce Connad's son Óengus III to his puppet – including installing an 'honor guard' of Norse 'mercenaries' from his ranks, who were under orders to kill the new King of Dál Riata if he defied any 'advice' from his new chief counselor – and also arranged the marriage of his son Sumarliði to Óengus' sister Gruoch. These were the beginnings of both the Viking 'Kingdom of the Isles', which would become a pestilence upon the British Isles and a base for further Viking wars of conquest during the ninth and tenth centuries, and the Norse-Gaelic or Gall-Ghàidheil populace of said isles.
Vikings coming ashore to engage the Dál Riatans at the site which future generations will dub 'Totronald' after their soon-to-be-victorious leader
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[1] Atarib.
[2] Cizre.
[3] This was an actual Huron tradition as recorded by French Jesuits in the 17th century.
[4] Onödowáʼga – better known as the Seneca people, who eventually became part of the Iroquois Confederacy.
[5] Al-Hadher, Syria.
[6] El Agheila.
[7] Ajdabiya.
[8] Thubactis – Misrata.
[9] Faroe Islands.
[10] Jisr ash-Shughur.
[11] The Kyrenia Mountains of northern Cyprus.
[12] Tawergha.
[13] Marj, Libya.
[14] Dessie.
[15] Lambay Island.
[16] Sligo.
[17] Lochgilphead.
[18] On the Trotternish peninsula of the Isle of Skye.
The Battle of Zardana had been the biggest land battle fought between the Romans and Arabs this year, and it set the stage for the Romans to slowly claw back additional ground around Antioch as far as Athareb[1] over a course of skirmishes and small sieges. Burhan al-Din, for his part, resisted his overlord's demand that he launch his own counterattack immediately in favor of avoiding pitched battle for the rest of 801 and waiting for additional reinforcements from Iraq, Filastin and Arabia instead. The Muslims didn't have much success in cracking the besieged fortresses of Nisibis and Dara to the east either, although at the recommendation of his mentor, Ala ud-Din did detach lighter elements of his army to begin harassing Corduene and southern Armenia in an attempt to divert the Armenian division of Constantine's army back toward their homeland. To that end he also established a large secondary camp around a river crossing near the ruins of long-gone Bezabde to serve as this detachment's forward-base, and the encampment would eventually grow into an Islamic town under the name of Jazirat ibn Ala-ud-Din[2] ('island of Ala-ud-Din') after himself.
While Roman success on land had been limited, the same could not be said of their success at sea, where the Italian fleet finally sailed forth to avenge the disaster off Seleucia Pieria from two years prior. Commanded by the Venetian lord Domenico Candiano (the most senior of Doge Gioviano Galbaio's sons-in-law and thus a brother by marriage to Orso Galbaio) and reinforced by an additional Constantinopolitan squadron, the Roman navy once more engaged Al-Walid ibn Abd Shams in the waters off Paphos late in 801 and this time won a resounding victory over the Arabic fleet – certainly it helped that this time, they were led by an admiral who actually knew what he was doing. The Muslim sailors did give a good account of themselves, but were ultimately defeated after their left squadron was overwhelmed by the Venetian galleys and Al-Walid's own flagship was burned to ash by Greek fire-throwers (although Al-Walid himself actually managed to escape in a lifeboat almost immediately after realizing his ship was aflame, this loss crippled the morale of his fleet). As the Arabs ended up retreating in disarray and amid great bloodshed, the Battle of Paphos also cleared the way for the Romans to retake Cyprus from the Caliphate, a task in which Leontios Rhangabe volunteered himself in a bid to remove the disgrace of Seleucia Pieria from his name.
Al-Walid's flagship is set ablaze at the climax of the Battle off Paphos
In China, the Liang and True Han were both busy consolidating their positions and rebuilding their lands after the devastation of the early Horse and Lotus Era. This was even reflected in the era names adopted by Huanzong and Dezu around this period – since hostilities had ended (and until they should begin again, either with each other or one of the contentious barbarians around them), Huanzong had in life adopted the era name 'Xianyi' or 'establishing justice', while Dezu took on the name 'Jianwen' or 'establishing civility'. Keenly aware that his red hair and the Turkic origins of his family left him with a good deal of ground to cover when it came to positive public relations, Huanzong sought to stress just how Sinicized he was (and had been since birth) and to secure the good graces of the ancient Chinese noble families of distinction, in large part by involving them in his government. His most notable appointment was that of Kong Qilong, the incumbent Marquis Shaosheng – the patriarch of the Kong clan and direct descendant of the great sage Confucius himself in the senior male line, in Qilong's case being from the 37th generation of descent – as his peacetime Grand Chancellor, and also elevating the ancestral dignity of the Kong clan to the rank of 'Duke Wenxuan'.
Since most of the notable Chinese aristocratic clans lived north of the Yangtze, Dezu did not have a similar option available to him and resolved to instead greatly increase the ranks of his own scholarly elite by reforming & expanding the imperial examination system. He opened the system to commoners and lesser gentry previously locked out by the background limitations of the Later Han soon after Emperor Yang's reign; ordered the names of examinees be hidden from their examiners to reduce the chance that latter's judgment might be tainted with bias (in either a positive or negative direction); and formalized testing on the prefectural (for jobs in the rural counties), metropolitan (for work in the cities) and palatial (for the highest-level government appointments) levels. Being a scion of a family of scholar-gentry himself, Dezu also set the trend of Emperors supervising the palatial examinations in person. In this manner the True Han offered greater social mobility (even to people of northern origin) than the Liang did, and also laid the groundwork for a new bureaucratic & intellectual elite to arise south of the Yangtze.
A palace examination candidate hands his work in to Dezu's aide, hoping he's done well enough to join the growing ranks of Southern China's new bureaucratic elite
Far away from the civilized lands, across the sea in Annún the Briton Pilgrims came into their first serious religious conflict with some of their Wilderman subjects, at this time still oblivious to the growing might of Dakaruniku far to their south. Now the Uendage had a habit of torturing and feasting on prisoners from a hostile tribe, starting by roasting and dividing the heart between their warriors if the foeman had previously shown courage[3], and this tradition was one that was obviously found horrifying and unacceptable by their British overlords, on top of jeopardizing Pilgrim relations with peoples hitherto uncontacted. Worse still in the eyes of the Britons, unlike the Anicinébe the Uendage's practice of cannibalism did not even seem justified by necessity, since their lands were considerably warmer and more fertile than those of their northwestern neighbors. King Brén (Old Brit.: 'Brwyn') interfered with one such sacrificial ceremony in summer of this year, preventing the Uendage from killing and eating captives from the 'Ínodouagé'[4] tribe which they'd taken in a raid across Lake Branoíne: said captives were taken into British custody and eventually recruited as interpreters in the royal court's service in order to contact their tribe at a later date.
Brén's nominal vassals were unamused at his intervention, and the affected tribes raised the standard of revolt because as far as they could tell, the Rí had violated their sacred customs for no good reason and set their enemies free when they could've and should've eaten the latter for strength instead. However, Brén was prepared for this eventuality and cracked down hard, leading his small quantity of knights and slightly larger quantity of British longbowmen – supported by a mass of loyal Anicinébe warriors – to suppress the Uendage rebellion by the end of the year. As a consequence of their defeat, more Uendage were compelled to undergo baptism, outlaw the tradition of cannibalizing their captives (though in practice it probably still went on, just underground and in greater secrecy, for at least a few more generations) and reaffirm their allegiance to the Pilgrim Kings, who in turn built more churches & monasteries in their lands and won the right to install priests as supervisors in their councils. In practical terms, not only was King Brén able to pull off a genuine humanitarian intervention in the affairs of one of his vassals, but in so doing he also successfully centralized greater authority over the Wildermen in the hands of his dynasty; further expanded the reach of Christianity among the former; and removed an avenue for his vassals to drag him into war with tribes he hadn't even known existed until recently.
In 802, the Syrian front stabilized as the Romans' efforts to push the Arabs further back this year stalled, while a reinforced Arab counter-counterattack got going in the spring and showed promise for a few weeks before being reversed by the efforts of the Rhangabe brothers at the Battle of Hazir[5] where though the Muslim cavalry initially drove their counterpart away, they proved incapable of resisting the temptation to loot the Roman camp before the engagement was actually won – almost needless to say, this breakdown in discipline cost Burhan al-Din the victory, as the Roman infantry under Count Herakleios went on to vanquish his own footmen and Duke Elpidios rallied the cavalrymen to surprise and rout his distracted horsemen later. After it became clear that the Syrian front wouldn't be budging much in either direction, Constantine dispatched Herakleios to relieve the sieges of Dara and Nisibis, which the latter did by the end of the year.
Other fronts proved more fluid. With Al-Walid's fleet now being the one to limp back to Alexandria in defeat and in no condition to contest the eastern Mediterranean anytime soon, the way was clear for the last and least of the Rhangabes to try to redeem himself, and to that end Count Leontios was furnished with two thousand marines (milites muscularii) on top of three times that number in other soldiers, mostly Italian legionaries and Bulgar or Slavic auxiliaries, for his Cypriot expedition. Ferried by the Italic fleet and supported in their landing by armed Italian sailors, Leontios successfully drove Abu al-Abbas' defending force away from the beach of Famagusta, a fishing village which was now growing swollen with refugees from nearby Salamis since the Arabs sacked it for not surrendering quickly enough to them (and to intimidate the rest of the island into yielding).
Since naval battles were still chiefly decided by boarding actions, and spearheading amphibious invasions wasn't a pleasant experience either, Roman marines or 'milites muscularii' ('muscular soldiers') tended to be as well-armored as regular legionaries in spite of the obvious hazards that wearing heavy armor into battle on the high seas poses, making them formidable fighters on ships & beaches alike
Now with that done and a base of operations established at Famagusta itself, Leontios continued to take the fight to his adversary and met the remaining Arab army on the island west of Salamis proper. Having been blockaded for a year by Candiano's fleet since the Battle off Paphos, the Arabs had run low on supplies and turned to pillaging even Greek towns which had surrendered to them, and those angry Cypriots had since gone on to reinforce the Roman reclamation force to a point where it comfortably outnumbered the Arab host. Fueled by desperation and more capably led by Abu al-Abbas, the Arabs fought with the ferocity of cornered lions and nearly won the day after breaking through Leontios' front line, but his Cypriot militia – poorly equipped and trained warriors certainly, but enthusiastic and numerous enough to make up for their deficiencies – plugged the gap long enough for their betters to turn the tide. By the year's end, Abu al-Abbas was stuck in the northern mountains of Cyprus and since rescue didn't seem to be coming anytime soon, although the vengeful Greeks' massacre of those among his men who tried to surrender at the denouement of the Battle of Salamis strongly inclined him to do otherwise, necessity compelled him to open negotiations with the Romans.
Africa seemed the most promising front for the Muslims this year, as Husam al-Din exchanged blows with the Dominus Rex Bãdalaréu across Libya for much of 802. The Islamic army in Cyrenaica was bolstered by the soldiers originally assigned to the Cretan expedition, which certainly wasn't going to happen now with the Romans having retaken control of the high seas anyway, and following an initial setback at the Battle of Anabucis[6] they quickly regained their footing and handed Bãdalaréu defeats of his own at Corniclanum[7] (a battle which Husam couldn't afford to lose in the first place, since he was defending a major water supply for his men there) and Oea, pushing the Moors all the way back to Tubagdés[8]. Even here however, it did not seem likely that the Saracens would hold their gains for long, as additional reinforcements were assembled on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules – the Goths were loath to make significant contributions toward the rescue of their African rivals, nevermind that Bãdalaréu was also their king Alarico III's brother-in-law, so it fell to the Celtiberians and the Hispano-Romans of the northeast to make up for the difference, led by Count Adriano (Lat.: 'Hadrianus') of Barcelona (who, as a descendant of Aloysius Gloriosus' eldest bastard son Sauromates, was a distant relative of Emperor Constantine VII). This relief force made its way over the straits and moved to bolster Bãdalaréu's ranks by the end of the year.
With his campaigns on all fronts either stalling or even facing small reverses in the big picture, Hussein resolved to try to tip the scales by getting the Khazars involved on his side. For some time now the Caliph had been cultivating more positive ties with the former Khazar enemy to his north, and in 802 his efforts seemed to finally bear some fruit as Isaac Khagan agreed to create the special office of Khazz – an autonomous governor for the growing community of Islamic expatriates in his capital – in addition to granting Muslim merchants trading privileges which were denied to their Roman counterparts. Unfortunately for him, the new Khagan was also exactly the opposite of the sort of ruler who would rush headlong into a foreign entanglement, having learned the importance of a cautious and temperate foreign policy from the disastrous mistakes of his forebears. Isaac made it clear that although he was fine with drawing closer to the Muslims to an extent, he would not commit to attacking the Romans' northern flank unless the Muslims started winning decisively on the battlefield, lest he end up on the losing side (or worse, if things started out well but then went south, the Caliphate might sell him out to save their own hide).
Hussein reads a letter from his ambassador to the court of Isaac Khagan, reporting on the latter's willingness to grant special privileges to the Muslim expatriates on the steppes but also his reluctance to open a northern front against their common Roman adversary
Far removed from the affairs of the Abrahamic empires, a Viking party was known to arrive in the islands of Fearann[9] for the first time in 802. There, as had been the case with the former Orcades, a minuscule community of Irish monks and villagers already existed, the latter having serviced sailors bound for Paparia and ultimately Aloysiana for many years now. For once the Norsemen did not come in hostility – not at first – but rather as traders and settlers, building their own village away from the preexisting Irish town that they found. However this peaceable state of affairs did not last long, as once the Nordic settlement grew large enough some years later, its increasingly greedy and warlike inhabitants began to harass the Irishmen and demand tribute from them. Rather than pay and forever live at the mercy of Viking bullies, the Irish of Fearann eventually went home or to the New World, leaving only scant traces of their settlement and their name for the islands: in the tongue of the Norsemen, Fearann eventually became Føroyar, or simply the 'Faroe Islands'.
Come 803, the Roman-Arab war started to seesaw in the latter's favor again, at least on its primary Syro-Mesopotamian front. With Dara and Nisibis secure for the time being, Count Herakleios and the Ghassanids attempted to counterattack toward Singara, but Ala ud-Din had put much work into consolidating Islam's hold on that area so as to better protect the approach to Mosul and ultimately inflicted a costly defeat on the returning Roman forces in the nine-month Sinjar Mountains Campaign. On a similar note, although Burhan al-Din never undertook any attacks of his own in the direction of Antioch at this time, he was able to turn back all attempts by Emperor Constantine and Duke Elpidios to make any significant advance into Islamic Syria this year, culminating in his suppression of a Roman offensive which sought to circumvent his western flank at the Battle of Seleucobelus[10] where he also captured Count Maisemin. Further straining Constantine himself, his longtime mistress Marcelle de Convelence died from a wasting illness in the early winter of this year, and yet despite his grief the demands of the ongoing war and the need to rescue their son from Muslim captivity prevented him from returning home to attend her funeral.
Hussein repeated his appeal to Atil on the basis of these Islamic victories, and while his arguments did not wholly win Isaac Khagan over, the latter was persuaded to at least begin raiding the edges of the Roman world. Khazar marauders pillaged Georgia, eastern Armenia, Ruthenia and Dacia with varying success in the later months of 803, with the parties operating out of Balanjar & the North Caucasus in particular sacking several wealthy Armenian monasteries and their attached villages. While hardly a true conquering expedition, these attacks to herald one to the Roman court in addition to pressuring Constantine's northern flank – the Caucasians now demanded that they be released from the main Roman armies so they could go and defend their homelands, and the Augustus Imperator sought quick victories on other fronts to both shore up his position & dissuade Isaac from attacking.
Khazar raiders moving through the Caucasus Mountains
Fortunately for the Romans, they did not have to wait long for such victories to come trickling in. The forces of Christendom achieved two triumphs over those of Islam, whose significance could not be easily ignored, near the end of 803: first and most easily achieved, they retook Cyprus in its entirety by negotiating the surrender of Abu al-Abbas' army. Twice the talks broke down and Count Leontios had tried to invade the Arab positions in the Pentadaktylos[11] range, but on both occasions he was unsuccessful at rooting the Saracens out of such difficult terrain, so ultimately Abu al-Abbas was able to secure his extraction from the island by way of Al-Walid's remaining ships near the end of the year. By that point, more than half of the Islamic expedition which had invaded & briefly conquered Cyprus was dead or missing (and probably dead, given the opprobrium they had incurred with the locals during their stay) – out of 10,000 men, fewer than 4,000 ended up making it back to 'Akka by sea. Leontios was specifically ordered not to attack the Muslims as they left their positions since the Muslims' end of this agreement involved having to release Maisemin & a similar number of Roman prisoners-of-war from captivity, and Constantine certainly wasn't about to jeopardize the life of one of the reminders he still had of his late love.
The second significant Roman victory this year was achieved in Africa, as Count Adriano's army arrived to join that of Bãdalaréu in Gardàgénu. They did so just in time for by the moment of their arrival, the Arabs were laying siege to Tubagdés, which was the second-to-last stop after Lepcés Magna and before Gardàgénu itself. In the face of this large relief force incoming from the northwest, Husam al-Din withdrew to Torghae[12] to the south, where he decided to give battle to the Romans. Six days of skirmishing and harassment preceded the actual engagement itself, where the Moorish light cavalry executed a feigned retreat of their own which got the Arabs to repeatedly charge their well-ordered and disciplined heavy infantry formations: of course, these attacks were mounted to no avail. At a critical juncture late on that seventh day, Husam was in the middle of repositioning his forces to try to break the Roman left wing, which Bãdalaréu and Adriano had made out to be the weakest link of their army, when the bulk of the Romans' own cavalry surged forth to attack his left.
A panicked rout ensued, starting on the Arab left wing and rippling outward, and the Muslims were forced off the field in disarray. By the year's end, the Romans had pushed the Libyan front back to Oea, thereby recapturing much of central Libya from the Saracens. Ironically, although King Alarico had held his only legitimate son Fruela (Got.: 'Froila') back (instead assigning command of the meager contingent he contributed to Adriano's army to Count Teodofredo of Cordoba, a distant Balthing cousin) precisely so that the Visigothic heir wouldn't be risking his life against the Arabs, the teenage prince of the Goths died anyway about a week after news of the great Roman victory at the Battle of Torghae broke, as his horse was spooked by a thunderbolt and threw him from its saddle while he was returning early from a hunting trip on account of the heavy autumn rain. Since Alarico's daughters were married to Adriano himself and the Celtiberian prince Viridomaro, heir to the incumbent Astur-Galician king Vismaro III, this tragedy set up a ruinous succession crisis for the oldest federate kingdom, though there were still some years to go before that dire consequence would be felt.
African and Hispano-Roman troops reaching the Arab camp after routing the latter from the battlefield of Torghae
Now near the end of 803, the Romans had turned the tide hard enough on most of the war's fronts to dissuade Isaac Khagan from escalating to full intervention, just as Constantine had hoped: but this was seen as no reason to not go ahead with their own plans to swing a prospective ally of their own, the Nubians, into the conflict. A Roman embassy carefully made its way to this long-isolated outpost of African Christianity to try to induce King Chael to attack the Arabs' southern flank while they were being pressed hard on other fronts. Chael had been reluctant to join the fray or even to cease paying tribute to the Caliphate, since one severe defeat at Saracen hands would surely end his kingdom (itself stitched together from the Nubians and Aksumites/Ethiopians who had managed to survive up to this point), but the drive to regain port access for his long-weakened and impoverished people and news of the major Roman victory at Torghae gave him the nerve to go ahead. Unfortunately for Hussein, the Nubians were not as skittish about committing to their chosen ally's side in full as the Khazars had been and Chael would soon lead his warriors on a campaign to drive Islam from the old Aksumite highlands and also to regain a coastline.
Since 803 had been a fairly good year for the Romans, the Arabs spent 804 on the defensive on all fronts, though this proved to be easier for them than attacking (again) and even though the Khazars did not directly enter the war on their behalf, the latter did still indirectly help them. Constantine had to let the Armenian and Georgian contingents of his army go home after an especially large Khazar raiding force of 5,000 men under Isaac's eldest son, Gideon Tarkhan, penetrated into the Armenian core and had to be bribed into going home by his eldest daughter Hilaria (now Armenia's queen) before they could make good on their threats to attack that kingdom's spiritual & political capitals at Etchmiadzin and Dvin, respectively. Without the Caucasians, the scheduled Roman attack on Idlib this year was doomed to failure, though by reuniting the Rhangabe brothers, scrapping a similarly-doomed second expedition to Sinjar and diverting troops from both Cyprus & Ghassanid Mesopotamia, the Augustus Imperator and Duke Elpidios found they had strength enough to repel Burhan's own offensive at the Second Battle of Athareb.
The Muslims initially dispatched reinforcements to Africa to bolster their new southern front with the Nubians, but Husam was able to persuade the Caliph that he needed these men first to hold back the Africans and other Roman allies in Libya. Now by the time these redirected men linked up with Husam's command at Derna (still 'Darnis' to the Romans) early in this year, Bãdalaréu and Adriano had already pushed into Cyrenaica and captured Benghazi/Berenice, but the newly-bolstered Husam immediately went on the counteroffensive and defeated the Roman army at the Battle of Barqa[13] (Lat.: 'Barca'). The Saracens expelled the Romans from Cyrenaica over the next few months, but had to also halt their attacks firstly because the Africans rallied and defeated them at the Second Battle of Arae Philaenorum, and secondly to finally deal with the Nubian offensive far to the south.
Chael had the benefit of attacking the Caliphate at a weak point when they were still too busy on other fronts to significantly shore up their defenses, and thus managed to drive Muslim forces from much of the central and southern Abyssinian Highlands with little trouble in the first half of 804. However, the Nubians ran into trouble once they started moving into the more heavily Islamized lands closer to the coast. Bypassing the ruins of Aksum itself, Chael had to fight harder for the lowland territories lying by the Gulf of Zula, and was still in the middle of besieging the port city of Adulis when Husam al-Din's vanguard descended upon his northern flank late in the year. The resulting battle was a defeat for the Nubians, who had to fall back into the mountains in a hurry to avoid annihilation while the Arab cavalry harrassed them. Once they completed their retreat however, the Nubians were able to use the more favorable highland terrain and the support of the remaining Aksumite Christians to defeat their pursuers at the Battle of Wasal[14].
Chael's Nubian warriors enjoy their brief stay on the Red Sea's beaches shortly before being driven back inland by the Arabs
At this point Hussein appeared to have had enough, having made incremental gains in Syria and Antioch which were then offset with losses in North and East Africa. Stronger-than-expected resistance on the part of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who had since proven to be a less able leader than his father but still not a man to be underestimated, and the failure of a full alliance with Khazaria to materialize had proven to be great disappointments indeed to the Caliph. However, Constantine himself was running out of steam – the first bad year of this war had stacked up Roman losses which he was clearly unable of completely reversing, having only managed to stem his losses in the Levant while his vassals made ultimately-modest gains in Libya. His Nubian ally similarly hadn't exactly turned out to be a tide-changing war-winner, although they had managed to secure a more defensible position for themselves in the highlands of old Aksum. With that in mind, when Hussein sued for peace near the end of 804, Constantine agreed to a ceasefire and to begin negotiating an end to their conflict.
It was also around this time that a notable community of Ionian Christians took root in the marshy wetlands of southern Mesopotamia, where their Hashemite persecutors found it difficult to follow them. Here they ingratiated themselves with the local marsh tribes or Ma'dan, who were at the time mostly known for living in reed houses called mudhifs and tending to herds of water buffaloes, and spread the faith among these locals who were isolated from (and, when interacted with, oft-regarded with some contempt as swamp-dwelling hicks by) the other Arabs. Other underground Ionians of the Babylonian Rite (not necessarily, but often, the ones who had retreated to their new marshland sanctuaries) reached out to the zanj slaves, among whom the Gospel proved a popular source of hope since their life under the Islamic lash was almost assuredly a short and brutish one. It would be some time still before Christianity built up enough of a critical mass among these peoples to seriously upset the power of the Caliphate, but that was probably for the best (for Christendom) – Constantine VII was not the right man to take advantage of such an opportunity anyway.
Zanj slaves living on the outskirts of the great Mesopotamian marshes give thanks to the Most High God and His Son, away from the eyes of their masters at camp and closer to the Babylonian Christians who enlightened them to the Gospel
On the opposite fringe of the Roman world away from Nubia, the Vikings launched their first major attacks out of the Orkney Islands this year, all targeting the Gaelic lands. Reavers laid waste to large parts of the kingdom of Dál Riata, establishing additional outposts & villages in the Hebrides as they went, and also pillaged the Irish coast as far south as the isle of Reachrainn[15] and as far west as Sligeach[16] in the lands of the Connachta. The Norse benefited greatly from disunity and endemic warfare among the Gaels: the Dál Riatans were at this time warring with the Dál Fiatach kings of Ulaid, hence why they had scant warriors left to defend their homes when the Viking longships turned up, and the Irish petty-kings who were not immediately targeted by these raids would more often than not actually opt to recruit Norsemen as mercenaries in their feuds with their neighbors – including the nominal High King at the time, Cenn mac Loingsech from Tír Eoghain, who believed these Norse sellswords represented an opportunity for him to restore Uí Néill hegemony over northern Ireland and eventually extend it to the south. The Vikings who took up this offer and similar others, of course, were content to let their employers believe whatever they wanted to believe and not to reveal the folly of this decision until it was too late for the Irish to do anything about it.
The Romans and Saracens spent much of 805 in a state of very uneasy truce around the bargaining table, trying to hash out peace terms to end their latest round of hostilities. The truce was riddled with low-intensity skirmishing and even outright broken twice however, once by each rival empire in a bid for last-minute gains & to strengthen their negotiating position – the Rhangabe brothers attempted an ill-advised attack on Phoenicia by both land and sea, while Burhan al-Din and Ala ud-Din launched a final broad offensive in Syria and what remained of Ghassanid Mesopotamia but floundered on both counts – and restored soon afterward, since prolonging the fighting too much was in neither's interest. Ultimately it took the Augustus Imperator and his Islamic counterpart until December to find a mutually acceptable settlement.
By the terms of the Peace of Samosata, the borders were frozen where they were at the end of overt large-scale hostilities, with a territorial exchange of sorts taking place between the Holy Roman Empire and the Caliphate. Hussein made some modest gains in Syria toward his intended goal of Antioch, mostly centered around Duhulabum/Idlib which he would waste no time in converting into a major forward-base for whenever the Muslims should strike at the fourth Heptarchic seat again, and less modest ones in Mesopotamia, where he severely truncated the Ghassanid realm and managed to remove the dagger pointed downward to the heart of his domain by way of the Ghassanids' former control of Sinjar and its environs. This peace was more favorable to the Stilichians than to the Aloysians themselves, since the former regained much of central Libya.
Outside of Roman borders, the Nubians also held on to their defensible buffer in the Abyssinian Highlands, and while they couldn't regain a shoreline, the Muslims agreed to reopen their Red Sea ports to Nubian trade and to exempt Nubian merchants from tariffs for ten years. The Caliph also relaxed his campaign of persecution against the Babylonian Christians, for now – not a small number of their ilk proved wise enough to not emerge from the southern Mesopotamian marshes or their hiding holes near slave barracks and other places of disrepute, in case this relief should prove short-lived. Finally, Hussein agreed to recognize Raphael Qaṭraya as the legitimate Patriarch of Babylon, thereby allowing him to actually assume his office, and to once more acknowledge Constantine's authority to appoint new Patriarchs in Jerusalem & Alexandria as well in exchange for a lump sum payment.
Now it seemed that events had turned out reasonably well for Emperor Constantine and the Romans. They did lose some territory, but it was balanced out by gains elsewhere and none of it immediately fatal or even seemingly significant on a map – there was still a defensive buffer zone around Antioch, albeit one more truncated than before, and their Ghassanid federates still held the formidable fortresses of Dara and Nisibis once used to withstand the Persians, which had since proven their worth against the Saracens time & again. It seemed that like with the Sassanids, the Romans & Arabs had settled into a cycle of wars around difficult-to-adjust borders. Constantine himself also gained valuable warfighting experience, his lack of which had proven a serious detriment at the start of hostilities. Unfortunately, it was at this point that the Augustus Imperator stumbled into a problem many past Emperors were familiar with: the legions being dissatisfied with their pay. Although he did actually pay out boni (bonuses) to his veterans as was customary at the conclusion of a war, some among the Antiochene legions believed that their deeds were worth more and that he was holding out on them. Alas, they were complaining to one nicknamed 'the Miser', who further had the death of his lover still weighing on his mind. Constantine thus reacted poorly to what he perceived to be the arrogant demands of greedy and entitled soldiers, adamant in his belief that he had paid them their fair due and they should be content with it – they were at his service and not he at theirs, as he would put it.
Constantine VII rebuking a legionary captain for demanding more money after the war with the Arabs, even though the Emperor just paid him his bonus and also had to pay Hussein more gold to regain his authority to appoint new Ionian Patriarchs on Islamic soil
Up north, the Dál Riatan king Connad mac Máel Dúin took a break from fighting the Irishmen of Ulaid to see to his own kingdom's defense against the new pagan interlopers from the north and east. Though his warriors may have been bloodied and their ranks somewhat depleted from those earlier hostilities, they still proved sufficient to catch and brutally execute Viking parties which had tried to raid around Iona and his own capital of Dunadd[17], leaving their corpses staked out on his beaches as a warning to their compatriots to stay away. To Connad's astonishment however, far from being intimidated by this display of savage Celtic justice, the Vikings retaliated in kind: the Orcadian jarl (Norse for 'chieftain') Røgnvaldr Godfriðson declared that he would go to war to avenge his fallen men, whose ranks included a cousin and brother of his, and promised much land, riches and women to any who would follow him on this campaign of vengeance. For the first time but certainly not the last or even the biggest, a British ruler had mnaged to turn Viking raids into a real invasion of his realm.
Røgnvaldr found his 500 volunteers (mostly Norsemen from home, not his fellow Orcadians) in short order and resoundingly defeated the outnumbered Dál Riatans in two large (by the standards of the far northern islets around Britannia, anyway) battles, one beneath a rocky outcrop called the Storr[18] and the other at a site which will be named Totronald (Gaelic: Tobhta Raghnaill) after him on the island called Coll, in-between many smaller raids and skirmishes at sea. The jarl personally killed the rival king at the Battle of Tobhta Raghnaill, where Connad absolutely refused to surrender since he knew the Vikings would subject him to a torturous death after what he did to their kin: since there wasn't much point to blood-eagling a corpse, Røgnvaldr cut him into bait for the fishes instead before going on to sack Dunadd. Unfortunately it turned out Dál Riata had little in the way of anything to offer the Vikings, but Røgnvaldr did reduce Connad's son Óengus III to his puppet – including installing an 'honor guard' of Norse 'mercenaries' from his ranks, who were under orders to kill the new King of Dál Riata if he defied any 'advice' from his new chief counselor – and also arranged the marriage of his son Sumarliði to Óengus' sister Gruoch. These were the beginnings of both the Viking 'Kingdom of the Isles', which would become a pestilence upon the British Isles and a base for further Viking wars of conquest during the ninth and tenth centuries, and the Norse-Gaelic or Gall-Ghàidheil populace of said isles.
Vikings coming ashore to engage the Dál Riatans at the site which future generations will dub 'Totronald' after their soon-to-be-victorious leader
====================================================================================
[1] Atarib.
[2] Cizre.
[3] This was an actual Huron tradition as recorded by French Jesuits in the 17th century.
[4] Onödowáʼga – better known as the Seneca people, who eventually became part of the Iroquois Confederacy.
[5] Al-Hadher, Syria.
[6] El Agheila.
[7] Ajdabiya.
[8] Thubactis – Misrata.
[9] Faroe Islands.
[10] Jisr ash-Shughur.
[11] The Kyrenia Mountains of northern Cyprus.
[12] Tawergha.
[13] Marj, Libya.
[14] Dessie.
[15] Lambay Island.
[16] Sligo.
[17] Lochgilphead.
[18] On the Trotternish peninsula of the Isle of Skye.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
It looks to me like Roman Empire is creeping towards an era of troubles, something that Caliphate and Khazars are bound to take advantage of.
Kind of like in Civ games:
Me: We are allies now.
X: Cool, I declare war on Y, send help.
Me: Who?
Did empress have a part in this illness occuring?
The ticking time bombs just keep cropping up
Kind of like in Civ games:
Me: We are allies now.
X: Cool, I declare war on Y, send help.
Me: Who?
Did empress have a part in this illness occuring?
The ticking time bombs just keep cropping up
So,stronger Nubia,bog christians who support black slaves,and problems with legions.
Not mention vikings on irish soil.
I bet,that when vikings raid end,we would find HRE ruling Ireland.If High King could not help his subjects,they must fiund somebody else.Roman Emperor seems good.
China - Han just becomed more cyvilized,but would it help them? like known sage,Conan the Librarian said,cyvilized people are weak!
P.S In Chad lake region arleady exist free cities of Sao culture - christians could help them.In OTL they never united,but fought muslims till 16th century.
And there was some nomad Kingdom,but they quickly become muslims.
Not mention vikings on irish soil.
I bet,that when vikings raid end,we would find HRE ruling Ireland.If High King could not help his subjects,they must fiund somebody else.Roman Emperor seems good.
China - Han just becomed more cyvilized,but would it help them? like known sage,Conan the Librarian said,cyvilized people are weak!
P.S In Chad lake region arleady exist free cities of Sao culture - christians could help them.In OTL they never united,but fought muslims till 16th century.
And there was some nomad Kingdom,but they quickly become muslims.
The invasion of Cyprus turned out better than the Muslims deserved. Reminds me of the island exploit in EU4 where you trick the AI into invading an island, trap them there wait for them to die from attrition while you invade elsewhere. One of the core ways of beating the Ottomans.
On the other hand, it would be much worse to let the troops set a precedent for extorting their Emperor. Again. Didn't end well the last time, the financial collapse triggered by the vicious circle of devaluing currency to fund repeated donatives reducing tax income forcing more devaluing didn't end until halfway through this timeline. I don't think anyone's actually learned how the economics works either, so it could well happen again.
806-810: The Root of Evil
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Picking up where 805 had left off, 806 began with a violent bang: disloyal elements of the Antiochene army, having just been spurned by Constantine VII when they demanded more gold from him, launched a mutiny against their master. It is uncertain how far the rebellious soldiers intended to go – whether the plan was just to take Constantine hostage and extort what they felt they were due from him (unlikely as it may be, since he would no doubt have sought revenge soon afterward), or outright name one of their own the new Augustus Imperator – because loyal legions and auxiliaries led by the Rhangabe brothers put the mutiny down well before the end of January. However, no less than Constantine himself was killed in the fracas, temporarily separated from his bodyguards and felled by an errant plumbata dart while trying to return behind the safety of their shields. Saint Paul had once said greed was the root of evil, and now indeed it had proven to be the ruin of both both Constantine 'the Miser' and his men – though at least the former died rather than show himself to be so weak that he could be bullied around by his soldiers. In being the first Aloysian ruler to die at his own men's hands, the seventh Constantine became a larger figure in death than he ever was in life, supplying the basis for many a legend about a miserable scrooge of an emperor or merchant prince whose greed ruined (or outright ended) his life: it would be many centuries before anyone would get around to writing a happier ending to his myth than the one he actually experienced.
The chaos of the Antiochene mutiny of 806, in which Constantine VII gained the dubious distinction of being the first Aloysian Emperor to be assassinated by his legions. Notably, Teutonic & Arabic auxiliaries can be seen helping to put the mutineers down
The death of the sixth Aloysian emperor threatened to send the Holy Roman Empire spiraling into chaos, on account of his heir Romanus still being only eleven years old, so those uninterested in such a spiral had to move quickly to stabilize the situation. While there were occasions on which the eastern half of the Roman world would seize the chance to proclaim its own emperor and try to split away from the Occident (as had already happened at the start of Aloysius II's reign), mercifully this would not be one of them, as Duke Elpidios Rhangabe was not interested in trying to claim his dead maternal cousin's crown. Understanding that the Orient was still in a precarious position with both the Muslims and Khazars having demonstrated hostile intentions, he instead penned a letter to Empress Rosamund after subjecting the surviving mutineers to decimation (contrary to Aloysius Gloriosus' instructions in the Virtus Exerciti, but the fact that they had murdered their emperor merited a revival of the legendarily harsh punishment in his view), warning her of what had befallen her husband and urging her to consolidate the regency back in Trévere. He did 'recommend' that he be named the next Praetorian Prefect of the Orient, but went no further than that, and in any case few others would have been more qualified than himself for the job at the time anyway.
Rosamund, who had been striving mightily to not publicly rejoice over her romantic rival Marcelle's demise over the past few years, was shocked and appalled to hear of how Constantine died. While their marriage may not have been a particularly happy or even desired one on either end and she certainly resented his long-term affair, Rosamund had not wanted her husband dead (and in such a random and dishonorable manner no less), and furthermore the Augusta was sufficiently politically astute to understand the dangers inherent to a child monarch's rule. Indeed, no sooner had she arranged for the coronation of young Romanus III and begun naming members of his regency council (of which she was naturally the head) did the first of those dangers rear its head – as word that the old Emperor was no more and his young son had been crowned in his stead Count Maisemin, who had returned from Antioch after being released from Islamic captivity, raised his banner in rebellion with the support of his father-in-law Bennacques de Senlis and other nearby partisans tied to the latter by bonds of friendship & marriage; why indeed, the insurgents proclaimed, should Constantine VII be succeeded in these dire times by a pudgy boy with no life experience, rather than a young man who had been tested on Levantine battlefields and was furthermore the son of the woman he actually loved?
It seemed to the Empress-Dowager that Marcelle was still stabbing at her heart from beyond the grave. However, Rosamund had not been blind to the threat perpetually posed to her own son's birthright by her husband's bastards even if the latter had willfully been, and set in motion the contingency plan she had drawn up with her brothers and cousins. As the Gallic rebels hastened to march on Trévere, hoping to avoid a civil war in favor of a quick coup d'etat to overthrow the regency and install Maisemin as Emperor before any great reaction could be amassed against them, they found themselves opposed by an army of 10,000 under Rosamund's younger brother the Comes Haistulf, which outnumbered theirs by more than 3 to 1: loyal Treverian legions supported by federate contingents from Saxony, Thuringia, Alemannia and Lombardy, the full array of Rosamund's kindred among the Teutons – only the auxiliaries from her native Lombardy were ironically not as numerous as they should have been, since their eldest brother Adelchis had gone to war with Poland over the Silesian lands almost as soon as news of Constantine's death reached both kingdoms.
Count Haistulf rejected all attempts by the rebels to backpedal and negotiate a settlement, viewing these as efforts to stall for time & reinforcements (and also being under orders from his sister to kill Maisemin at all costs), in favor of immediately attacking them with his overwhelming numbers. He and the loyalists prevailed in the Battle of Bouillon which followed, killing Maisemin in the rout of the rebel army and capturing & executing Bennacques a few days later. The Empress-Dowager was relieved to know that Maisemin had only managed to sire a daughter with his wife Briaste before his death, so she could have them both committed to a convent (rather than potentially have an infant boy's blood on her hands) and safely terminate the first Aloysian House of Valois then and there: as for his estates and those of Bennacques, those she awarded to her victorious brother. If not for the various crises unfolding this year and over the next ones, at this point she no doubt would have taken steps to tighten marriage & inheritance regulations to ensure everyone understood that offspring from concubinage and common-law marriages (ex. The Celto-Germanic custom of 'handfasting', still popular across Northern Europe) could not inherit, and that the only unions which were legitimate were those announced in a church and officiated by an Ionian priest – no matter what her own Germanic supporters might have thought.
The Lething royals of Lombardy were generally depicted as redheads with the temper & ferocity to match, but Rosamund Waltharistohter was noted to possess a calculating, patient & phlegmatic disposition – traits which served her well in her feud with Marcelle de Convelence and now in her son's regency, where a crisis seemingly every year would enormously tax that patience
As it was, such reform would have to wait. Although Rosamund successfully saw off this first threat to her bloodline's hold on the purple, the real challenges of her regency still lay ahead of her. Grudges between the Poles and her fellow Lombards as well as the Dulebians and Dacians had exploded into open warfare in the meantime; the Africans and Barcelonans and Celtiberians were circling Gothic Spania as they waited for Alarico III to die; this new Norse scourge nipped at the northern fringes of the Roman world; and of course the Muslims and Khazars still loomed large on the horizon. Suffice to say that the Empress had her work cut out for her when it came to ensuring they all survived long enough for Romanus III to attain his majority (even if it wasn't as far off as it would have been had Constantine died a decade prior), much less in regard to making sure he wouldn't be spending his entire reign trying to reverse any losses they might incur during his minority.
Speaking of the latter two rival empires, in Kufa Caliph Hussein reportedly burst out cackling like a hyena when he received word of Constantine's demise so soon after the latter had prevented him from achieving any great victory. Declaring that clearly Allah had given him a new opportunity and he would be a fool to waste it, he moved to tear up the Peace of Samosata and prepare another attack on Antioch posthaste, using newly-captured Idlib and Jisr ash-Shughur as the forward bases from which to do so. Those Ionian Christians who declined to emerge from their hiding places, whether in the Mesopotamian Marshes or other underground hideouts across the Caliphate, had their caution vindicated in short order as well. To the north, Isaac's reaction was rather more subdued, well in line with his far less bombastic personality compared to both Hussein and his predecessors. Still the Khazar leader, who had been prepared to negotiate an end to his raids with the late Augustus Imperator, decided that in fact his sons should keep on pillaging after all, and that perhaps it was time to break the troublesome Ruthenian kingdom and bring the East Slavs firmly back under the Khazar yoke.
807 saw the regency scrambling to contain the growing crises straining the Holy Roman Empire before any of them could flare up fully. Rosamund's first move this year was to meddle in the brewing Gothic succession crisis: with the death of his legitimate heir Fruela, King Alarico III was left with two male heirs in the form of Teodofredo (Got.: 'Theodefred'), Count of Cordoba – a cousin of his from a Balthing cadet branch descended from his great-granduncle Athanagildo – and Bermudo (Got.: 'Veremund') de Cartagena, the illegitimate son of his deceased brother Suniefredo, former count of that city. While Bermudo was closer to Alarico both in terms of blood relations and as a friend, his mother being the lowborn mistress of Suniefredo proved an insurmountable obstacle for his claim in the eyes of the Empress-Regent: that situation resembled Marcelle's and her children's too much for her liking, and she was not about to set the precedent that a bastard could be legitimized and inherit ahead of available male heirs after freshly crushing Maisemin's uprising.
Teodofredo Hermenegildez of Cordoba and Bermudo Suniefredez of Cartagena, the rival Balthing claimants to the Gothic throne, who represented the legitimate continuation of the line of Alaric I and the closest blood relative to the incumbent king respectively
Thus Rosamund did decline Alarico's request to legitimize Bermudo and make him the direct heir to the Gothic throne, in favor of trying to align with Teodofredo instead. To that end she arranged the marriage of her remaining unwed daughter Octavia, now in her late teens, to Teodofredo's son Ranimiro (Got.: 'Ranamir') and pressed Alarico to dictate that the Count of Cordoba should be his heir, but the king dragged his feet on the matter. Meanwhile Count Adriano of Barcelona and Viridomaro of the Astures & Galicians both made little secret of their intent to claim the Gothic throne through their wives, Alarico's daughters, and while Alarico's brother-in-law Bãdalaréu of Africa was wary of a Saracen move against newly-reconquered Libya he also knew he couldn't pass up the wonderful opportunity to massively expand Stilichian power presented by his own claim to the Gothic throne.
Bermudo Suniefredez was not the only bastard of high birth who Rosamund was antagonizing and trying to contain this year. She may have removed Maisemin, and the Galbaios had neither desire nor ability to seize control of the Holy Roman Empire through their marriage to his sister Solpeche, but those two's remaining brother Onoré still remained under her suspicion. The Bishop of Arles hadn't been able to do anything in support of Maisemin owing to how quickly and decisively the loyalist forces had shut his uprising down, and tried to spin off his welcoming of the latter's return from the Levant at the port of Arles (shortly before the Count went north & started his revolt) as merely one brother greeting the other in a friendly manner, as he should have: but while this and a public profession of loyalty to Romanus III allayed most people's fears, it wasn't enough to keep Rosamund from aligning with forces within the Ionian Church opposed to Onoré rising any further in stature. Pope Callixtus & company had no interest in another Aloysian Pope, and neither did Rosamund if that Pope's name was most likely going to be 'Honorius'.
However, other pressing matters would soon force Rosamund to divert all of her attention and resources away from the brewing war of succession in Hispania. To the east, she interfered in the Polish-Lombard war to bail out her brother Adelchis, who was losing the conflict at the time after overconfidently blundering into a trap set by the Polish king (and Romanus' maternal uncle) King Bożydar at the Battle of Uraz east of the Oder. Imperial diplomatic pressure was certainly one reason why Bożydar backed down and agreed to restore the territorial status quo in Silesia despite the Lombards having instigated this round of hostilities and then going on to lose – he had hoped Maisemin's rising would have been more than a flash in the pan and distracted Rosamund for longer – but much more importantly, a considerable Khazar incursion was underway and threatened the Slavic realms beyond the Oder & Dniester. The main thrust of the Khazar attack was aimed at Ruthenia, where Isaac's sons Gideon Tarkhan and Eleazar Tarkhan burned down most of Kyiv but were unable to crack open the central gord or citadel (which had been rebuilt with help from Roman engineers) where the majority of the populace sheltered, but their slaving raids had penetrated as far as Poland & Dacia and all parties involved, despite their differences, had to agree that the Khazar yoke extending its reach back westward was not in any of their interest.
Adelchis, King of the Lombards, looking oddly chipper in the aftermath of his defeat at Uraz. Then again, he doubtless knows that his little sister has his back, no matter what happens on the battlefield
To the south, the Saracens also decided 807 would be a good time to strike – it would seem then that the Arab-Khazar alliance was back on after all. Caliph Hussein and Burhan al-Din concentrated their strength on trying to take Antioch, where they besieged the Rhangabe brothers. While the earlier decimations might have further strained Roman manpower in this front, Elpidios defended his decision by asserting that a harsh example had to be made to dissuade any further mutinies or attempted usurpations from within the ranks and that they still had strength enough to hold out against the Arab invaders until the regency sent help. Arab raiders did also strike at the Ghassanid realm and into Libya, but these were very much secondary fronts in Hussein's mind where Antioch represented a vastly greater prize than Dara, Nisibis or Oea – he was determined to either take the seat of the See of Saint Paul, or else die trying.
Half a world away from Rome's sphere, the Yamato were engaged in intensive castle-building across the northern provinces of Dewa and Michinoku (collectively known as the Tōhoku region) so as to provide local fixtures for defense against the Emishi tribes, while also trying to sway as many of said Emishi tribals to accept the authority of the Emperor as possible. This strategy, devised by the now-elderly Kamo no Agatamori and following the example of his own successful negotiations with Kearui, proved far more successful than previous attempts to clear out the Emishi had and also expanded the resource & manpower base of the burgeoning Japanese state both by securing new lands without the need to scorch it in warfare first and setting up the gradual assimilation of many of the Emishi into their populace.
For his part, Emperor Suzaku was no more – the man hailed as the favored of the gods for apparently having successfully called on them to smite Zhang Ai's fleets having died of old age shortly after the dawn of the new century. But his son Go-Saimei also took the opportunity to move his court from mountainous and highly defensible but rather isolated Yoshino to a more centrally located site, easily accessible by both land and aquatic transport, where he built a new capital city that he dubbed 'Heian-kyō' – 'peaceful and tranquil capital', signaling the imminent Yamato consolidation of Honshū and a hopeful transition to a more peaceful and prosperous era, free of even the slightest fear of foreign threats (whether Emishi or Chinese). 807 is thus considered to have brought the 'Yoshino Period' of Japanese history to a close, and to begin the 'Heian Period' in its stead.
The late eighth and early ninth centuries marked the dawn of a new age of prosperity, consolidation and cultural development for the Japanese civilization, symbolized by their construction of a better-positioned and more glorious capital at Heian-kyō
The Romans found their fortunes, which had been off to a poor or at best middling start at the dawn of the ninth century, shifting all over the place in 808. On the eastern front, the sons and nephews of Isaac Khagan continued to rampage across Ruthenia and the Caucasus, and at their furthest also penetrated into Poland and Dacia. Rosamund dispatched mounted legions and auxiliaries from the Germanic kingdoms (including her own Lombardy, despite the lingering grudges between them and the Poles which required their contingents to be positioned as far away from one another on the battlefield as possible) to aid the Slavic federates. A large push to relieve Grand Prince Lev of Ruthenia, who was still cooped up in Kyiv's citadel, had to be carefully planned with the Poles and Volhynians over the first half of the year. Rosamund also mediated the border dispute raging between the Dulebians and Dacians in order to get both to contribute to the war effort, as well.
In spite of the bloodshed and mutual distrust or outright animosity between nearly every party involved, the Roman coalition did finally get off the ground in June of 808, and their combined strength of 12,000 was enough to scare away the forward-most of the Khazar raiders early in the campaign. The Khazars rallied around Gideon and Eleazar's army (now swollen to about 8,000 strong) and made their stand against the Christians at the Battle of the Teteriv River, a ways northwest of Kyiv – this battlefield was the one they had chosen because the presence of nearby impassable marshes would conveniently protect their right flank from the larger Christian host. Said marshes did hinder the Khazars' own mobility, so while their infantry line (anchored by heavily armed contingents of Steppe Jews and mercenary footsoldiers) engaged its coalition counterpart, Gideon and his brothers threw their all into the cavalry clash on their left and the Christian right with the intent of rolling the Christian infantry after putting their horsemen to flight. The Khazar cavalry had the edge for most of the fighting, but the Christians' greater numbers allowed Count Haistulf to keep a substantial reserve which he committed right as it seemed his cavalry was in danger of breaking, reversing the enemy's fortunes and enabling him to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
The Battle of the Teteriv forced the Khazars to retreat back beyond the Dnieper and dispelled any ideas about a quick and easy reconquest of Ruthenia (at minimum) on Atil's part. In the meantime, Hussein's siege of Antioch was proceeding slowly after he had breached the still-incompletely-repaired first defensive lines away from the city, and it was here that another stroke of good fortune befell the Romans. While this Caliph, being no great warrior, had been careful to stay well away from the front lines of any battle or siege camp, such prudence was of no help when confronted with lethal disease outbreaks, as oft happened in both besieged cities and the besiegers' camp alike. A typhoid epidemic inflicted not-insignificant casualties on the Muslim army almost a year into the siege, and while Burhan al-Din survived his brush with the slow fever, Hussein did not. The Rhangabe brothers and their garrison cheered the sight of the depleted Islamic host withdrawing in disarray, not only so that Burhan could gather reinforcements but also to make sure that Hussein's son Ali would succeed him smoothly, and in Trévere Rosamund hailed the news as evidence of God's righteous punishment upon the House of the Prophet for breaking the Peace of Samosata while her husband's corpse was still cooling.
Caliph Hussein lying in his sickbed while his physicians are trying (and failing) to treat his typhoid fever
All that said, it was still far from smooth sailing on all fronts for the Aloysians this year. The long-awaited death of Alarico III of the Goths occurred on fall's eve this year, and fittingly it preceded the fall of the Gothic kingdom as a whole. Teodofredo and Bermudo's factions had been brought to an apparent conciliation while he was still lying on his deathbed, whereby they agreed to rule as joint kings in a revival of the ancient Gothic custom of dual kingship, albeit with Teodofredo as the undisputed senior of the two. But although this arrangement gained the approval of an assembled council of the Visigoth nobility and Empress Rosamund, it was seen as nothing more than a hindrance by the Count of Barcelona, the Celtiberians and most dangerously the Africans, all of whom were determined to press their respective claims on the kingdom which covered two-thirds of Hispania anyway. While this meant that the three rival claimants were certainly breaching the Emperor's peace and disregarding the imperial court's orders to respect the last-minute Gothic succession arrangement, in other words being engaged in a state of rebellion, nobody at the time wanted to officially declare that, least of all the regency council itself.
The Aloysians found themselves almost immediately off to a bad start in the 'War of the Gothic Succession' which ensued. Commitments in the Levant and Ruthenia meant they had almost no manpower to spare to defend Teodofredo & Bermudo's reign, in spite of Rosamund having recognized them as the legitimate Kings of the Visigoths. What they did have to spare was a Sicilian squadron detached from the Italian fleet (then busy containing the Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean), with which they intended to at least block the Pillars of Hercules and prevent the Africans from landing until after the Balthing cousins had dealt with their rivals to the north, but an unexpected and severe storm wrecked it off the Sardinian coast and effectively ended non-diplomatic imperial involvement in the crisis. A plan to use the Carthaginian legions to shut down the African court was considered but declined by Rosamund, who was afraid that such a move would not only trigger a civil war with the Stilichians she could ill-afford, but also cost the crown the trust of all its other federates and persuade them to cease tolerating a legionary presence anywhere near their lands. Now while the Lord-King Bãdalaréu had left 7,000 men to guard the Libyan frontier under the command of his son's father-in-law Dux Seraénu ('Seraph') ey Nabala, a lack of major Saracen offensives in that direction on account of Hussein's ultimately fatal concentration on Antioch freed him up to invade southern Hispania with his main army, which at 14,000 strong was a testament as to why Stilichian Africa was still the most powerful federate kingdom overall.
Against this host, the divided Visigoths could only muster 7,000 men on quick notice. Faulty intelligence and Teodofredo's conviction that they should win a major victory as soon as possible to solidify their claim (which Bermudo did remarkably little to talk him out of) resulted in the two kings leaving Toledo to face Bãdalaréu within days of their coronation rather than wait for reinforcements to further enlarge their host, and promptly blundering into a ruinous defeat at the Battle of La Janda near Gádiz. Not that the Goths had much hope of victory to begin with, but Bermudo added to his own side's misfortune by exploiting their decision to encamp their contingents separately to flee the battlefield the night before the battle itself was fought, fully expecting to become the sole King of the Goths within another day. In that regard at least he wasn't disappointed, as the now-hopelessly outnumbered Teodofredo was crushed by the Moors the very next morning and killed in desperate single combat with Bãdalaréu's son and heir Prince Érreréyu (Van.: 'Hilderic') by the lake which gave the battlefield its name. His son (and Rosamund's newest son-in-law) Ranimiro was among the few survivors captured and had little choice but to pledge allegiance to Bãdalaréu as the new King of Hispania, in the process abdicating his own claims to the latter, so as to avoid getting his head removed by a Moorish executioner's ax.
The African prince Érreréyu catches up to Teodofredo by the lake of La Janda as the latter tries to flee the site of his crippling defeat. The War of the Gothic Succession was not the first succession crisis in Visigothic history; but where before they had survived the Aetas Turbida (for instance), here ineptitude, treachery and disunity ensured this time would be the last
Old Pope Callixtus II died early in 809, and was swiftly succeeded by a candidate agreed upon between himself, the Cardinals and the Empress-Regent shortly before his expected demise: his pupil and Papal secretary Sergius, formerly head of the Apostolic Library of the Vatican, now Pope Sergius II. Bishop Onoré d'Arles, of course, was not even considered by the Cardinals or the people of Rome and could expect little from the new regime but continued marginalization, leading him to put feelers out to the Stilichians to determine whether they were ready to try to retake the purple from the Aloysians who had displaced them a century and a half prior. To his dismay, it turned out they weren't, as Bãdalaréu was primarily concerned with conquering Gothic Spain and did not believe Africa to be strong enough to make a certain go at the throne yet. Thus, the Papal succession was one of the few things to go smoothly for the regency this year.
Hispania remained the biggest bone of contention within the Holy Roman Empire's borders, outweighing all the petty squabbles between the Slavs and Teutons (or Slavs and Dacians, or Slavs and Slavs) to the east. Bãdalaréu eschewed the idea of attempting to push right onto Toledo in favor of consolidating African control over Baetica, using Ranimiro as both a hostage to secure compliance and an example of his willingness to give the southern Spaniards a fair shake under his rule: he respected the young man's right to succeed his father as Count of Cordoba and did not touch his estates in exchange for his professed loyalty. Much of the southern Spanish nobility were also alienated by the treacherous manner in which Bermudo disposed of their chief, while Bãdalaréu stressed that while he actually did kill Teodofredo at least had the grace to face him like a real man and his son had vanquished the rival claimant in honorable single combat. The Moors were successful in securing Baetica as a base for further operations into Hispania, but their vanguard under Érreréyu was defeated in an overconfident and improperly supported attack on Toledo later in the year, slowing their progress.
Besides thwarting the Moorish prince's assault, Bermudo at first seemed to be having a reasonable year. While the southern partisans of Teodofredo must have regarded him with disgust, and he was not entirely successful in getting the northern and central Gothic nobility on board either, at least he didn't completely alienate them. The support he still had and reinforcements he was able to gather from his own power-base around Cartagena (his hometown) and Murcia had first proven sufficient to defend Toledo, then to check the advances of the Barcelonans and Celtiberians. While the Goths were getting routed at La Janda, Adriano had negotiated the defection of Tarracona[2], captured Cèsaraugusta[3] with the aid of its oppressed Jews and swayed or otherwise beaten many of the northeastern barons into joining his cause, and Vismaro & Viridomaro had done much the same with the lords of the old province of Lusitania. Even the far-western captain Gonzalo Sunearez had joined the latter after hearing of Teodofredo's demise, passing ownership of the Islas Atlantes to the Celtiberi and becoming better-known to history as Gonçalo Suniáres in the (new) 'Lusitana' language[4] evolving out of the absorption of the ancient Gallaeci language into the Vulgar Latin dialect of far western Hispania (not to be confused with Old Lusitanian, which had been absorbed by no later than the second century).
Ranimiro Teodofredez bending the knee to Bãdalaréu before the latter's sons and court. The Gothic nobility generally had few issues with switching their allegiance to rival claimants to the title 'King of Hispania' for them, who all shared their faith and even Patriarchate anyway, as long as those claimants seemed strong and pledged not to touch their properties & privileges
Now fortunately for Bermudo, the Celtiberians and Barcelonans were not united, and skirmished as fiercely and frequently with one another as they did his own scattered forces. After driving back Érreréyu, the Balthing bastard-king moved to engage the former's army outside Emérida[4] and broke their siege of that city: Vismaro was injured by a javelin in the fighting, and died a few weeks later after the wound became infected. Before he could turn his lance in Adriano's direction however, the Count of Barcelona had a trick up his own sleeve to deal with this remaining Gothic rival – a fake defector from his camp (actually a real one initially, but Adriano sniffed out the plot and took his sons hostage to subvert his scheme), claiming to carry his master's campaign plans, who at first knelt before Bermudo when brought into his presence but then fatally stabbed him with a long dagger.
While the assassin was immediately cut down by Bermudo's guards, the damage was done, and in what everyone in Hispania other than his own partisans regarded as fitting retribution from above, the man who had eliminated his rival for the Gothic crown through treacherous abandonment had himself been killed treacherously. Bermudo's death without any children of his own left his supporters panicked and headless, clearing the path for Adriano to storm into Toledo and compel the Gothic nobility there to hail him as their king and his wife Aragonta, Alarico's elder daughter and thus Bermudo's cousin, as their rightful queen while the Africans and Celtiberians were still licking their wounds. Adding to Rosamund's misfortune (for despite her general disdain for bastards, she wasn't above working with Bermudo out of political convenience), her reluctant second choice for the Gothic crown had now died and with him the main Balthing line, with the Gothic kingdom itself sure to follow soon while an array of less palatable candidates prepared to keep fighting one another over its remains.
For her part, the Empress-Regent was preoccupied with trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the Khazars. Isaac may have failed to conquer Ruthenia (much less move on Poland or Volhynia) in this moment of weakness, but even with the defeat on the Teteriv, his raiders had managed to secure a handsome profit and undermine the Roman defense in the south. And while Hussein's unexpected death had prevented the Hashemites from fully capitalizing on their own opportunity, in this year Burhan al-Din was able to see off all prospective challengers to Ali ibn Hussein's assumption of the Caliphate and was repositioning the Saracen armies for another go at Mesopotamia, putting pressure on the regency council to seek moderate terms. Thus the Khazars were able to get away with whatever loot wasn't recovered after the Teteriv, disappointing the eastern Slavic kingdoms, and Isaac was able to extort tribute in gold & silver from the Romans for peace, a demand which did not sit well with Emperor Romanus (who, at fourteen, was informed of the terms at his first-ever chance to sit in on the proceedings of his mother's council & Senate).
Roman ambassadors handing a tribute payment off to Isaac Khagan in order to secure peace & quiet on their northern flank
With Bermudo dead and the next closest Balthing relative being firmly under the thumb of the Africans, Rosamund had to think quickly to salvage the situation in Hispania and – if not push the Moors out of the peninsula entirely – then at least ensure the whole of the Gothic realm didn't fall into Stilichian hands, which would certainly massively increase their power relative to that of their Aloysian overlords. To that end, as of 810 she fell back on the option of partitioning Hispania along the lines of the three great Roman governorates of old: Tarraconensis in the northeast (including the newer province of Carthaginensis in central-eastern Spain), Lusitania in the west (including the province of Gallaecia), and Baetica in the south. The Aquitani, whose rulers had no ties of marriage to the Balthings and had so far remained uninvolved, represented a useful tool with which to help enforce such a settlement, but they could not possibly do so alone (even while having remained unbloodied, they didn't have the strength to overcome just Adriano or Viridomaro, much less all three combatants), so the Empress-Regent's first order of business was getting some of the warring powers on board with her plan.
Ironically, it was the Stilichians themselves who proved most helpful to Rosamund's scheming, not anything she did herself. By 810 Bãdalaréu had consolidated his hold on Baetica and absorbed the supporters of the Theodefreding cadet branch of the larger Balthing dynasty into his ranks, which coupled with the acquisition of reinforcements from Africa, swelled his army in the peninsula to 20,000 strong – the largest of any of the contenders by a wide margin. With this mighty host and both Érreréyu & Ranimiro in tow he marched onto Toledo, leaving his second son Arroderéyu (Got.: 'Roderic') to hold Cordoba, and while Adriano may have gotten far with intrigue, his daggers proved little match for African swords. The Barcelonans were put to flight in the Battle of Argamasilla[6] that summer which, being fought on a flat and sparsely populated plain that was part of Hispania's great inner plateau, afforded the superior Moorish cavalry (to whom the Spanish heat was no challenge, as they lived with worse back home, and whose dromedary contingent proved to be a handy anti-cavalry unit) a great opportunity to cut their enemies to ribbons.
Having barely escaped that disaster with his life and lacking the strength to hold Toledo, Adriano evacuated back to his base in the northeast in a hurry. The Celtiberians now moved to race the Moors to the Gothic capital, but Viridomaro found the gates barred by the garrison of 400 men left by Adriano to cover his retreat. While such a tiny force would normally be no challenge to the 6,000-strong Celtiberian army, they did hold out long enough atop Toledo's walls for Bãdalaréu to arrive and rout the latter in a great battle outside the city, after which he took over the siege and in a month's time bribed the defenders into yielding their hopeless position in exchange for being allowed to leave with their lives, horses and armor. The African king and his Gothic wife Gosuinda made a triumphal entry into the latter's home in fall of 810, and from his position Bãdalaréu saw no reason to settle for 'just' southern Spain when it seemed he could take it all.
The great Stilichian victories of this year did not only leave their enemies reeling, however. Adriano and Viridomaro now both saw that they could not possibly defeat the Africans on their lonesome and, with the whole of old Gothic Spain out of their reach, were more amenable to allying in order to preserve their slices of it. This played directly into Rosamund's design, and a partition of Hispania along the old Roman lines had become a much more attractive proposal now that the alternative seemed to be African domination of the peninsula. Before the year's end Emperor Romanus would travel to Tolosa to wed Adriano's daughter Joana, and also elevate him to the kingly rank over a new 'Kingdom of Tarraco' – a new height for the House of Barcelona or so-called 'Yazigos' descended from Sauromates 'el Sarmata', eldest son of Aloysius Gloriosus and his first mistress the Iazyges princess Aritê – as well as to acknowledge Viridomaro as not merely King of the Galicians and Astures and Cantabrians, but of Lusitania. Of course Bãdalaréu still rejected Rosamund's proposal for partition, since Baetica was the smallest province and as far as he was concerned he could absolutely take on the combined strength of the other Spanish kingdoms & still prevail, but she had expected him to do so and now took steps to push the Aquitani to add their fresh forces to the new Tarracan-Lusitanian alliance.
The Yazigos of Barcelona notably used the draco standard of their maternal ancestors in battle, and in addition to serving as the legitimate Aloysian main line's bulwark in Hispania, also restored the blond blue-eyed look of their common ancestor to the latter through their first princess Joana's marriage to Romanus III
However Rosamund, and for that matter Bãdalaréu as well, could not afford to purely fixate on Hispania. No sooner had hostilities on the Khazar front cooled and the Poles & Lombards settled down to lick their wounds did the Saxons and Thuringians decided this would be a good time to go to war with their Wendish neighbors, coupled with intensifying border skirmishes & feuds among the Serbs, Thracians and Croats further compounding the Empress-Dowager's migraines. Burhan al-Din also launched his invasion of Mesopotamia this year with the intent of finishing off the Ghassanids (a worthy secondary goal if Antioch was out of his reach), and defeated Count Herakleios and the Ghassanid & Bulgar armies in the Battle of Thannuris[7] on the Aburas River[8]. Husam al-Din also had not been blind to the Moors' great distraction to the far west, and aside from trading barbs & skirmishes with Duke Seraénu, was also marshaling an expedition to retake central Libya in Egypt.
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[1] Kyoto. Historically, Heian-kyō was built in 794 instead, and the previous Japanese capital was Nara rather than Yoshino.
[2] Tarraco – Tarragona.
[3] Caesaraugusta – Zaragoza.
[4] If Espanesco more or less corresponds to Old Spanish (sans the Arabic imprint of course), 'Lusitana' then is the timeline's equivalent to Galician-Portuguese, the ancestor of modern Portuguese & Galician/Galego.
[5] Emerita Augusta – Mérida.
[6] Now Argamasilla de Calatrava, north of Puertollano.
[7] Tell Tuneinir.
[8] The Khabur River.
The chaos of the Antiochene mutiny of 806, in which Constantine VII gained the dubious distinction of being the first Aloysian Emperor to be assassinated by his legions. Notably, Teutonic & Arabic auxiliaries can be seen helping to put the mutineers down
The death of the sixth Aloysian emperor threatened to send the Holy Roman Empire spiraling into chaos, on account of his heir Romanus still being only eleven years old, so those uninterested in such a spiral had to move quickly to stabilize the situation. While there were occasions on which the eastern half of the Roman world would seize the chance to proclaim its own emperor and try to split away from the Occident (as had already happened at the start of Aloysius II's reign), mercifully this would not be one of them, as Duke Elpidios Rhangabe was not interested in trying to claim his dead maternal cousin's crown. Understanding that the Orient was still in a precarious position with both the Muslims and Khazars having demonstrated hostile intentions, he instead penned a letter to Empress Rosamund after subjecting the surviving mutineers to decimation (contrary to Aloysius Gloriosus' instructions in the Virtus Exerciti, but the fact that they had murdered their emperor merited a revival of the legendarily harsh punishment in his view), warning her of what had befallen her husband and urging her to consolidate the regency back in Trévere. He did 'recommend' that he be named the next Praetorian Prefect of the Orient, but went no further than that, and in any case few others would have been more qualified than himself for the job at the time anyway.
Rosamund, who had been striving mightily to not publicly rejoice over her romantic rival Marcelle's demise over the past few years, was shocked and appalled to hear of how Constantine died. While their marriage may not have been a particularly happy or even desired one on either end and she certainly resented his long-term affair, Rosamund had not wanted her husband dead (and in such a random and dishonorable manner no less), and furthermore the Augusta was sufficiently politically astute to understand the dangers inherent to a child monarch's rule. Indeed, no sooner had she arranged for the coronation of young Romanus III and begun naming members of his regency council (of which she was naturally the head) did the first of those dangers rear its head – as word that the old Emperor was no more and his young son had been crowned in his stead Count Maisemin, who had returned from Antioch after being released from Islamic captivity, raised his banner in rebellion with the support of his father-in-law Bennacques de Senlis and other nearby partisans tied to the latter by bonds of friendship & marriage; why indeed, the insurgents proclaimed, should Constantine VII be succeeded in these dire times by a pudgy boy with no life experience, rather than a young man who had been tested on Levantine battlefields and was furthermore the son of the woman he actually loved?
It seemed to the Empress-Dowager that Marcelle was still stabbing at her heart from beyond the grave. However, Rosamund had not been blind to the threat perpetually posed to her own son's birthright by her husband's bastards even if the latter had willfully been, and set in motion the contingency plan she had drawn up with her brothers and cousins. As the Gallic rebels hastened to march on Trévere, hoping to avoid a civil war in favor of a quick coup d'etat to overthrow the regency and install Maisemin as Emperor before any great reaction could be amassed against them, they found themselves opposed by an army of 10,000 under Rosamund's younger brother the Comes Haistulf, which outnumbered theirs by more than 3 to 1: loyal Treverian legions supported by federate contingents from Saxony, Thuringia, Alemannia and Lombardy, the full array of Rosamund's kindred among the Teutons – only the auxiliaries from her native Lombardy were ironically not as numerous as they should have been, since their eldest brother Adelchis had gone to war with Poland over the Silesian lands almost as soon as news of Constantine's death reached both kingdoms.
Count Haistulf rejected all attempts by the rebels to backpedal and negotiate a settlement, viewing these as efforts to stall for time & reinforcements (and also being under orders from his sister to kill Maisemin at all costs), in favor of immediately attacking them with his overwhelming numbers. He and the loyalists prevailed in the Battle of Bouillon which followed, killing Maisemin in the rout of the rebel army and capturing & executing Bennacques a few days later. The Empress-Dowager was relieved to know that Maisemin had only managed to sire a daughter with his wife Briaste before his death, so she could have them both committed to a convent (rather than potentially have an infant boy's blood on her hands) and safely terminate the first Aloysian House of Valois then and there: as for his estates and those of Bennacques, those she awarded to her victorious brother. If not for the various crises unfolding this year and over the next ones, at this point she no doubt would have taken steps to tighten marriage & inheritance regulations to ensure everyone understood that offspring from concubinage and common-law marriages (ex. The Celto-Germanic custom of 'handfasting', still popular across Northern Europe) could not inherit, and that the only unions which were legitimate were those announced in a church and officiated by an Ionian priest – no matter what her own Germanic supporters might have thought.
The Lething royals of Lombardy were generally depicted as redheads with the temper & ferocity to match, but Rosamund Waltharistohter was noted to possess a calculating, patient & phlegmatic disposition – traits which served her well in her feud with Marcelle de Convelence and now in her son's regency, where a crisis seemingly every year would enormously tax that patience
As it was, such reform would have to wait. Although Rosamund successfully saw off this first threat to her bloodline's hold on the purple, the real challenges of her regency still lay ahead of her. Grudges between the Poles and her fellow Lombards as well as the Dulebians and Dacians had exploded into open warfare in the meantime; the Africans and Barcelonans and Celtiberians were circling Gothic Spania as they waited for Alarico III to die; this new Norse scourge nipped at the northern fringes of the Roman world; and of course the Muslims and Khazars still loomed large on the horizon. Suffice to say that the Empress had her work cut out for her when it came to ensuring they all survived long enough for Romanus III to attain his majority (even if it wasn't as far off as it would have been had Constantine died a decade prior), much less in regard to making sure he wouldn't be spending his entire reign trying to reverse any losses they might incur during his minority.
Speaking of the latter two rival empires, in Kufa Caliph Hussein reportedly burst out cackling like a hyena when he received word of Constantine's demise so soon after the latter had prevented him from achieving any great victory. Declaring that clearly Allah had given him a new opportunity and he would be a fool to waste it, he moved to tear up the Peace of Samosata and prepare another attack on Antioch posthaste, using newly-captured Idlib and Jisr ash-Shughur as the forward bases from which to do so. Those Ionian Christians who declined to emerge from their hiding places, whether in the Mesopotamian Marshes or other underground hideouts across the Caliphate, had their caution vindicated in short order as well. To the north, Isaac's reaction was rather more subdued, well in line with his far less bombastic personality compared to both Hussein and his predecessors. Still the Khazar leader, who had been prepared to negotiate an end to his raids with the late Augustus Imperator, decided that in fact his sons should keep on pillaging after all, and that perhaps it was time to break the troublesome Ruthenian kingdom and bring the East Slavs firmly back under the Khazar yoke.
807 saw the regency scrambling to contain the growing crises straining the Holy Roman Empire before any of them could flare up fully. Rosamund's first move this year was to meddle in the brewing Gothic succession crisis: with the death of his legitimate heir Fruela, King Alarico III was left with two male heirs in the form of Teodofredo (Got.: 'Theodefred'), Count of Cordoba – a cousin of his from a Balthing cadet branch descended from his great-granduncle Athanagildo – and Bermudo (Got.: 'Veremund') de Cartagena, the illegitimate son of his deceased brother Suniefredo, former count of that city. While Bermudo was closer to Alarico both in terms of blood relations and as a friend, his mother being the lowborn mistress of Suniefredo proved an insurmountable obstacle for his claim in the eyes of the Empress-Regent: that situation resembled Marcelle's and her children's too much for her liking, and she was not about to set the precedent that a bastard could be legitimized and inherit ahead of available male heirs after freshly crushing Maisemin's uprising.
Teodofredo Hermenegildez of Cordoba and Bermudo Suniefredez of Cartagena, the rival Balthing claimants to the Gothic throne, who represented the legitimate continuation of the line of Alaric I and the closest blood relative to the incumbent king respectively
Thus Rosamund did decline Alarico's request to legitimize Bermudo and make him the direct heir to the Gothic throne, in favor of trying to align with Teodofredo instead. To that end she arranged the marriage of her remaining unwed daughter Octavia, now in her late teens, to Teodofredo's son Ranimiro (Got.: 'Ranamir') and pressed Alarico to dictate that the Count of Cordoba should be his heir, but the king dragged his feet on the matter. Meanwhile Count Adriano of Barcelona and Viridomaro of the Astures & Galicians both made little secret of their intent to claim the Gothic throne through their wives, Alarico's daughters, and while Alarico's brother-in-law Bãdalaréu of Africa was wary of a Saracen move against newly-reconquered Libya he also knew he couldn't pass up the wonderful opportunity to massively expand Stilichian power presented by his own claim to the Gothic throne.
Bermudo Suniefredez was not the only bastard of high birth who Rosamund was antagonizing and trying to contain this year. She may have removed Maisemin, and the Galbaios had neither desire nor ability to seize control of the Holy Roman Empire through their marriage to his sister Solpeche, but those two's remaining brother Onoré still remained under her suspicion. The Bishop of Arles hadn't been able to do anything in support of Maisemin owing to how quickly and decisively the loyalist forces had shut his uprising down, and tried to spin off his welcoming of the latter's return from the Levant at the port of Arles (shortly before the Count went north & started his revolt) as merely one brother greeting the other in a friendly manner, as he should have: but while this and a public profession of loyalty to Romanus III allayed most people's fears, it wasn't enough to keep Rosamund from aligning with forces within the Ionian Church opposed to Onoré rising any further in stature. Pope Callixtus & company had no interest in another Aloysian Pope, and neither did Rosamund if that Pope's name was most likely going to be 'Honorius'.
However, other pressing matters would soon force Rosamund to divert all of her attention and resources away from the brewing war of succession in Hispania. To the east, she interfered in the Polish-Lombard war to bail out her brother Adelchis, who was losing the conflict at the time after overconfidently blundering into a trap set by the Polish king (and Romanus' maternal uncle) King Bożydar at the Battle of Uraz east of the Oder. Imperial diplomatic pressure was certainly one reason why Bożydar backed down and agreed to restore the territorial status quo in Silesia despite the Lombards having instigated this round of hostilities and then going on to lose – he had hoped Maisemin's rising would have been more than a flash in the pan and distracted Rosamund for longer – but much more importantly, a considerable Khazar incursion was underway and threatened the Slavic realms beyond the Oder & Dniester. The main thrust of the Khazar attack was aimed at Ruthenia, where Isaac's sons Gideon Tarkhan and Eleazar Tarkhan burned down most of Kyiv but were unable to crack open the central gord or citadel (which had been rebuilt with help from Roman engineers) where the majority of the populace sheltered, but their slaving raids had penetrated as far as Poland & Dacia and all parties involved, despite their differences, had to agree that the Khazar yoke extending its reach back westward was not in any of their interest.
Adelchis, King of the Lombards, looking oddly chipper in the aftermath of his defeat at Uraz. Then again, he doubtless knows that his little sister has his back, no matter what happens on the battlefield
To the south, the Saracens also decided 807 would be a good time to strike – it would seem then that the Arab-Khazar alliance was back on after all. Caliph Hussein and Burhan al-Din concentrated their strength on trying to take Antioch, where they besieged the Rhangabe brothers. While the earlier decimations might have further strained Roman manpower in this front, Elpidios defended his decision by asserting that a harsh example had to be made to dissuade any further mutinies or attempted usurpations from within the ranks and that they still had strength enough to hold out against the Arab invaders until the regency sent help. Arab raiders did also strike at the Ghassanid realm and into Libya, but these were very much secondary fronts in Hussein's mind where Antioch represented a vastly greater prize than Dara, Nisibis or Oea – he was determined to either take the seat of the See of Saint Paul, or else die trying.
Half a world away from Rome's sphere, the Yamato were engaged in intensive castle-building across the northern provinces of Dewa and Michinoku (collectively known as the Tōhoku region) so as to provide local fixtures for defense against the Emishi tribes, while also trying to sway as many of said Emishi tribals to accept the authority of the Emperor as possible. This strategy, devised by the now-elderly Kamo no Agatamori and following the example of his own successful negotiations with Kearui, proved far more successful than previous attempts to clear out the Emishi had and also expanded the resource & manpower base of the burgeoning Japanese state both by securing new lands without the need to scorch it in warfare first and setting up the gradual assimilation of many of the Emishi into their populace.
For his part, Emperor Suzaku was no more – the man hailed as the favored of the gods for apparently having successfully called on them to smite Zhang Ai's fleets having died of old age shortly after the dawn of the new century. But his son Go-Saimei also took the opportunity to move his court from mountainous and highly defensible but rather isolated Yoshino to a more centrally located site, easily accessible by both land and aquatic transport, where he built a new capital city that he dubbed 'Heian-kyō' – 'peaceful and tranquil capital', signaling the imminent Yamato consolidation of Honshū and a hopeful transition to a more peaceful and prosperous era, free of even the slightest fear of foreign threats (whether Emishi or Chinese). 807 is thus considered to have brought the 'Yoshino Period' of Japanese history to a close, and to begin the 'Heian Period' in its stead.
The late eighth and early ninth centuries marked the dawn of a new age of prosperity, consolidation and cultural development for the Japanese civilization, symbolized by their construction of a better-positioned and more glorious capital at Heian-kyō
The Romans found their fortunes, which had been off to a poor or at best middling start at the dawn of the ninth century, shifting all over the place in 808. On the eastern front, the sons and nephews of Isaac Khagan continued to rampage across Ruthenia and the Caucasus, and at their furthest also penetrated into Poland and Dacia. Rosamund dispatched mounted legions and auxiliaries from the Germanic kingdoms (including her own Lombardy, despite the lingering grudges between them and the Poles which required their contingents to be positioned as far away from one another on the battlefield as possible) to aid the Slavic federates. A large push to relieve Grand Prince Lev of Ruthenia, who was still cooped up in Kyiv's citadel, had to be carefully planned with the Poles and Volhynians over the first half of the year. Rosamund also mediated the border dispute raging between the Dulebians and Dacians in order to get both to contribute to the war effort, as well.
In spite of the bloodshed and mutual distrust or outright animosity between nearly every party involved, the Roman coalition did finally get off the ground in June of 808, and their combined strength of 12,000 was enough to scare away the forward-most of the Khazar raiders early in the campaign. The Khazars rallied around Gideon and Eleazar's army (now swollen to about 8,000 strong) and made their stand against the Christians at the Battle of the Teteriv River, a ways northwest of Kyiv – this battlefield was the one they had chosen because the presence of nearby impassable marshes would conveniently protect their right flank from the larger Christian host. Said marshes did hinder the Khazars' own mobility, so while their infantry line (anchored by heavily armed contingents of Steppe Jews and mercenary footsoldiers) engaged its coalition counterpart, Gideon and his brothers threw their all into the cavalry clash on their left and the Christian right with the intent of rolling the Christian infantry after putting their horsemen to flight. The Khazar cavalry had the edge for most of the fighting, but the Christians' greater numbers allowed Count Haistulf to keep a substantial reserve which he committed right as it seemed his cavalry was in danger of breaking, reversing the enemy's fortunes and enabling him to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
The Battle of the Teteriv forced the Khazars to retreat back beyond the Dnieper and dispelled any ideas about a quick and easy reconquest of Ruthenia (at minimum) on Atil's part. In the meantime, Hussein's siege of Antioch was proceeding slowly after he had breached the still-incompletely-repaired first defensive lines away from the city, and it was here that another stroke of good fortune befell the Romans. While this Caliph, being no great warrior, had been careful to stay well away from the front lines of any battle or siege camp, such prudence was of no help when confronted with lethal disease outbreaks, as oft happened in both besieged cities and the besiegers' camp alike. A typhoid epidemic inflicted not-insignificant casualties on the Muslim army almost a year into the siege, and while Burhan al-Din survived his brush with the slow fever, Hussein did not. The Rhangabe brothers and their garrison cheered the sight of the depleted Islamic host withdrawing in disarray, not only so that Burhan could gather reinforcements but also to make sure that Hussein's son Ali would succeed him smoothly, and in Trévere Rosamund hailed the news as evidence of God's righteous punishment upon the House of the Prophet for breaking the Peace of Samosata while her husband's corpse was still cooling.
Caliph Hussein lying in his sickbed while his physicians are trying (and failing) to treat his typhoid fever
All that said, it was still far from smooth sailing on all fronts for the Aloysians this year. The long-awaited death of Alarico III of the Goths occurred on fall's eve this year, and fittingly it preceded the fall of the Gothic kingdom as a whole. Teodofredo and Bermudo's factions had been brought to an apparent conciliation while he was still lying on his deathbed, whereby they agreed to rule as joint kings in a revival of the ancient Gothic custom of dual kingship, albeit with Teodofredo as the undisputed senior of the two. But although this arrangement gained the approval of an assembled council of the Visigoth nobility and Empress Rosamund, it was seen as nothing more than a hindrance by the Count of Barcelona, the Celtiberians and most dangerously the Africans, all of whom were determined to press their respective claims on the kingdom which covered two-thirds of Hispania anyway. While this meant that the three rival claimants were certainly breaching the Emperor's peace and disregarding the imperial court's orders to respect the last-minute Gothic succession arrangement, in other words being engaged in a state of rebellion, nobody at the time wanted to officially declare that, least of all the regency council itself.
The Aloysians found themselves almost immediately off to a bad start in the 'War of the Gothic Succession' which ensued. Commitments in the Levant and Ruthenia meant they had almost no manpower to spare to defend Teodofredo & Bermudo's reign, in spite of Rosamund having recognized them as the legitimate Kings of the Visigoths. What they did have to spare was a Sicilian squadron detached from the Italian fleet (then busy containing the Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean), with which they intended to at least block the Pillars of Hercules and prevent the Africans from landing until after the Balthing cousins had dealt with their rivals to the north, but an unexpected and severe storm wrecked it off the Sardinian coast and effectively ended non-diplomatic imperial involvement in the crisis. A plan to use the Carthaginian legions to shut down the African court was considered but declined by Rosamund, who was afraid that such a move would not only trigger a civil war with the Stilichians she could ill-afford, but also cost the crown the trust of all its other federates and persuade them to cease tolerating a legionary presence anywhere near their lands. Now while the Lord-King Bãdalaréu had left 7,000 men to guard the Libyan frontier under the command of his son's father-in-law Dux Seraénu ('Seraph') ey Nabala, a lack of major Saracen offensives in that direction on account of Hussein's ultimately fatal concentration on Antioch freed him up to invade southern Hispania with his main army, which at 14,000 strong was a testament as to why Stilichian Africa was still the most powerful federate kingdom overall.
Against this host, the divided Visigoths could only muster 7,000 men on quick notice. Faulty intelligence and Teodofredo's conviction that they should win a major victory as soon as possible to solidify their claim (which Bermudo did remarkably little to talk him out of) resulted in the two kings leaving Toledo to face Bãdalaréu within days of their coronation rather than wait for reinforcements to further enlarge their host, and promptly blundering into a ruinous defeat at the Battle of La Janda near Gádiz. Not that the Goths had much hope of victory to begin with, but Bermudo added to his own side's misfortune by exploiting their decision to encamp their contingents separately to flee the battlefield the night before the battle itself was fought, fully expecting to become the sole King of the Goths within another day. In that regard at least he wasn't disappointed, as the now-hopelessly outnumbered Teodofredo was crushed by the Moors the very next morning and killed in desperate single combat with Bãdalaréu's son and heir Prince Érreréyu (Van.: 'Hilderic') by the lake which gave the battlefield its name. His son (and Rosamund's newest son-in-law) Ranimiro was among the few survivors captured and had little choice but to pledge allegiance to Bãdalaréu as the new King of Hispania, in the process abdicating his own claims to the latter, so as to avoid getting his head removed by a Moorish executioner's ax.
The African prince Érreréyu catches up to Teodofredo by the lake of La Janda as the latter tries to flee the site of his crippling defeat. The War of the Gothic Succession was not the first succession crisis in Visigothic history; but where before they had survived the Aetas Turbida (for instance), here ineptitude, treachery and disunity ensured this time would be the last
Old Pope Callixtus II died early in 809, and was swiftly succeeded by a candidate agreed upon between himself, the Cardinals and the Empress-Regent shortly before his expected demise: his pupil and Papal secretary Sergius, formerly head of the Apostolic Library of the Vatican, now Pope Sergius II. Bishop Onoré d'Arles, of course, was not even considered by the Cardinals or the people of Rome and could expect little from the new regime but continued marginalization, leading him to put feelers out to the Stilichians to determine whether they were ready to try to retake the purple from the Aloysians who had displaced them a century and a half prior. To his dismay, it turned out they weren't, as Bãdalaréu was primarily concerned with conquering Gothic Spain and did not believe Africa to be strong enough to make a certain go at the throne yet. Thus, the Papal succession was one of the few things to go smoothly for the regency this year.
Hispania remained the biggest bone of contention within the Holy Roman Empire's borders, outweighing all the petty squabbles between the Slavs and Teutons (or Slavs and Dacians, or Slavs and Slavs) to the east. Bãdalaréu eschewed the idea of attempting to push right onto Toledo in favor of consolidating African control over Baetica, using Ranimiro as both a hostage to secure compliance and an example of his willingness to give the southern Spaniards a fair shake under his rule: he respected the young man's right to succeed his father as Count of Cordoba and did not touch his estates in exchange for his professed loyalty. Much of the southern Spanish nobility were also alienated by the treacherous manner in which Bermudo disposed of their chief, while Bãdalaréu stressed that while he actually did kill Teodofredo at least had the grace to face him like a real man and his son had vanquished the rival claimant in honorable single combat. The Moors were successful in securing Baetica as a base for further operations into Hispania, but their vanguard under Érreréyu was defeated in an overconfident and improperly supported attack on Toledo later in the year, slowing their progress.
Besides thwarting the Moorish prince's assault, Bermudo at first seemed to be having a reasonable year. While the southern partisans of Teodofredo must have regarded him with disgust, and he was not entirely successful in getting the northern and central Gothic nobility on board either, at least he didn't completely alienate them. The support he still had and reinforcements he was able to gather from his own power-base around Cartagena (his hometown) and Murcia had first proven sufficient to defend Toledo, then to check the advances of the Barcelonans and Celtiberians. While the Goths were getting routed at La Janda, Adriano had negotiated the defection of Tarracona[2], captured Cèsaraugusta[3] with the aid of its oppressed Jews and swayed or otherwise beaten many of the northeastern barons into joining his cause, and Vismaro & Viridomaro had done much the same with the lords of the old province of Lusitania. Even the far-western captain Gonzalo Sunearez had joined the latter after hearing of Teodofredo's demise, passing ownership of the Islas Atlantes to the Celtiberi and becoming better-known to history as Gonçalo Suniáres in the (new) 'Lusitana' language[4] evolving out of the absorption of the ancient Gallaeci language into the Vulgar Latin dialect of far western Hispania (not to be confused with Old Lusitanian, which had been absorbed by no later than the second century).
Ranimiro Teodofredez bending the knee to Bãdalaréu before the latter's sons and court. The Gothic nobility generally had few issues with switching their allegiance to rival claimants to the title 'King of Hispania' for them, who all shared their faith and even Patriarchate anyway, as long as those claimants seemed strong and pledged not to touch their properties & privileges
Now fortunately for Bermudo, the Celtiberians and Barcelonans were not united, and skirmished as fiercely and frequently with one another as they did his own scattered forces. After driving back Érreréyu, the Balthing bastard-king moved to engage the former's army outside Emérida[4] and broke their siege of that city: Vismaro was injured by a javelin in the fighting, and died a few weeks later after the wound became infected. Before he could turn his lance in Adriano's direction however, the Count of Barcelona had a trick up his own sleeve to deal with this remaining Gothic rival – a fake defector from his camp (actually a real one initially, but Adriano sniffed out the plot and took his sons hostage to subvert his scheme), claiming to carry his master's campaign plans, who at first knelt before Bermudo when brought into his presence but then fatally stabbed him with a long dagger.
While the assassin was immediately cut down by Bermudo's guards, the damage was done, and in what everyone in Hispania other than his own partisans regarded as fitting retribution from above, the man who had eliminated his rival for the Gothic crown through treacherous abandonment had himself been killed treacherously. Bermudo's death without any children of his own left his supporters panicked and headless, clearing the path for Adriano to storm into Toledo and compel the Gothic nobility there to hail him as their king and his wife Aragonta, Alarico's elder daughter and thus Bermudo's cousin, as their rightful queen while the Africans and Celtiberians were still licking their wounds. Adding to Rosamund's misfortune (for despite her general disdain for bastards, she wasn't above working with Bermudo out of political convenience), her reluctant second choice for the Gothic crown had now died and with him the main Balthing line, with the Gothic kingdom itself sure to follow soon while an array of less palatable candidates prepared to keep fighting one another over its remains.
For her part, the Empress-Regent was preoccupied with trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the Khazars. Isaac may have failed to conquer Ruthenia (much less move on Poland or Volhynia) in this moment of weakness, but even with the defeat on the Teteriv, his raiders had managed to secure a handsome profit and undermine the Roman defense in the south. And while Hussein's unexpected death had prevented the Hashemites from fully capitalizing on their own opportunity, in this year Burhan al-Din was able to see off all prospective challengers to Ali ibn Hussein's assumption of the Caliphate and was repositioning the Saracen armies for another go at Mesopotamia, putting pressure on the regency council to seek moderate terms. Thus the Khazars were able to get away with whatever loot wasn't recovered after the Teteriv, disappointing the eastern Slavic kingdoms, and Isaac was able to extort tribute in gold & silver from the Romans for peace, a demand which did not sit well with Emperor Romanus (who, at fourteen, was informed of the terms at his first-ever chance to sit in on the proceedings of his mother's council & Senate).
Roman ambassadors handing a tribute payment off to Isaac Khagan in order to secure peace & quiet on their northern flank
With Bermudo dead and the next closest Balthing relative being firmly under the thumb of the Africans, Rosamund had to think quickly to salvage the situation in Hispania and – if not push the Moors out of the peninsula entirely – then at least ensure the whole of the Gothic realm didn't fall into Stilichian hands, which would certainly massively increase their power relative to that of their Aloysian overlords. To that end, as of 810 she fell back on the option of partitioning Hispania along the lines of the three great Roman governorates of old: Tarraconensis in the northeast (including the newer province of Carthaginensis in central-eastern Spain), Lusitania in the west (including the province of Gallaecia), and Baetica in the south. The Aquitani, whose rulers had no ties of marriage to the Balthings and had so far remained uninvolved, represented a useful tool with which to help enforce such a settlement, but they could not possibly do so alone (even while having remained unbloodied, they didn't have the strength to overcome just Adriano or Viridomaro, much less all three combatants), so the Empress-Regent's first order of business was getting some of the warring powers on board with her plan.
Ironically, it was the Stilichians themselves who proved most helpful to Rosamund's scheming, not anything she did herself. By 810 Bãdalaréu had consolidated his hold on Baetica and absorbed the supporters of the Theodefreding cadet branch of the larger Balthing dynasty into his ranks, which coupled with the acquisition of reinforcements from Africa, swelled his army in the peninsula to 20,000 strong – the largest of any of the contenders by a wide margin. With this mighty host and both Érreréyu & Ranimiro in tow he marched onto Toledo, leaving his second son Arroderéyu (Got.: 'Roderic') to hold Cordoba, and while Adriano may have gotten far with intrigue, his daggers proved little match for African swords. The Barcelonans were put to flight in the Battle of Argamasilla[6] that summer which, being fought on a flat and sparsely populated plain that was part of Hispania's great inner plateau, afforded the superior Moorish cavalry (to whom the Spanish heat was no challenge, as they lived with worse back home, and whose dromedary contingent proved to be a handy anti-cavalry unit) a great opportunity to cut their enemies to ribbons.
Having barely escaped that disaster with his life and lacking the strength to hold Toledo, Adriano evacuated back to his base in the northeast in a hurry. The Celtiberians now moved to race the Moors to the Gothic capital, but Viridomaro found the gates barred by the garrison of 400 men left by Adriano to cover his retreat. While such a tiny force would normally be no challenge to the 6,000-strong Celtiberian army, they did hold out long enough atop Toledo's walls for Bãdalaréu to arrive and rout the latter in a great battle outside the city, after which he took over the siege and in a month's time bribed the defenders into yielding their hopeless position in exchange for being allowed to leave with their lives, horses and armor. The African king and his Gothic wife Gosuinda made a triumphal entry into the latter's home in fall of 810, and from his position Bãdalaréu saw no reason to settle for 'just' southern Spain when it seemed he could take it all.
The great Stilichian victories of this year did not only leave their enemies reeling, however. Adriano and Viridomaro now both saw that they could not possibly defeat the Africans on their lonesome and, with the whole of old Gothic Spain out of their reach, were more amenable to allying in order to preserve their slices of it. This played directly into Rosamund's design, and a partition of Hispania along the old Roman lines had become a much more attractive proposal now that the alternative seemed to be African domination of the peninsula. Before the year's end Emperor Romanus would travel to Tolosa to wed Adriano's daughter Joana, and also elevate him to the kingly rank over a new 'Kingdom of Tarraco' – a new height for the House of Barcelona or so-called 'Yazigos' descended from Sauromates 'el Sarmata', eldest son of Aloysius Gloriosus and his first mistress the Iazyges princess Aritê – as well as to acknowledge Viridomaro as not merely King of the Galicians and Astures and Cantabrians, but of Lusitania. Of course Bãdalaréu still rejected Rosamund's proposal for partition, since Baetica was the smallest province and as far as he was concerned he could absolutely take on the combined strength of the other Spanish kingdoms & still prevail, but she had expected him to do so and now took steps to push the Aquitani to add their fresh forces to the new Tarracan-Lusitanian alliance.
The Yazigos of Barcelona notably used the draco standard of their maternal ancestors in battle, and in addition to serving as the legitimate Aloysian main line's bulwark in Hispania, also restored the blond blue-eyed look of their common ancestor to the latter through their first princess Joana's marriage to Romanus III
However Rosamund, and for that matter Bãdalaréu as well, could not afford to purely fixate on Hispania. No sooner had hostilities on the Khazar front cooled and the Poles & Lombards settled down to lick their wounds did the Saxons and Thuringians decided this would be a good time to go to war with their Wendish neighbors, coupled with intensifying border skirmishes & feuds among the Serbs, Thracians and Croats further compounding the Empress-Dowager's migraines. Burhan al-Din also launched his invasion of Mesopotamia this year with the intent of finishing off the Ghassanids (a worthy secondary goal if Antioch was out of his reach), and defeated Count Herakleios and the Ghassanid & Bulgar armies in the Battle of Thannuris[7] on the Aburas River[8]. Husam al-Din also had not been blind to the Moors' great distraction to the far west, and aside from trading barbs & skirmishes with Duke Seraénu, was also marshaling an expedition to retake central Libya in Egypt.
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[1] Kyoto. Historically, Heian-kyō was built in 794 instead, and the previous Japanese capital was Nara rather than Yoshino.
[2] Tarraco – Tarragona.
[3] Caesaraugusta – Zaragoza.
[4] If Espanesco more or less corresponds to Old Spanish (sans the Arabic imprint of course), 'Lusitana' then is the timeline's equivalent to Galician-Portuguese, the ancestor of modern Portuguese & Galician/Galego.
[5] Emerita Augusta – Mérida.
[6] Now Argamasilla de Calatrava, north of Puertollano.
[7] Tell Tuneinir.
[8] The Khabur River.
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PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
The first of the time bombs caused quite a cascade. I think these times of troubles will last for quite some time.
Contentious people, the Slavs.
Contentious people, the Slavs.
1.Not think so - muslims would made Stilithian see reason.
2.Contentious people? we slavs? not possible,we are people of peace!
And those slavs we killed was not real slavs,anyway!
Jokes aside - i think,that HRE should hold without bigger loses,and Stilitchians would not get too much from theit victories.
P.S @Circle of Willis ,who would get Azores?
Sounds like the Empire needs an Imperial Reform, or at least a reichskammergericht, not that that stopped the 30 Years War.
And now we'll see if the Stilichian reputation for prioritizing the good of the Empire over personal power still holds in their descendants. And Rosamund might need to start scheming about getting a Stilichian 2nd son to partition any joined kingdoms. That was the historical pattern in the HRE thanks to Germanic Law about division between sons, so conveniently breaking up troublesome vassals always has the imprimatur of legality. It'll be kind of funny if the greater success of Roman Law screws over the Roman Emperors.
And now we'll see if the Stilichian reputation for prioritizing the good of the Empire over personal power still holds in their descendants. And Rosamund might need to start scheming about getting a Stilichian 2nd son to partition any joined kingdoms. That was the historical pattern in the HRE thanks to Germanic Law about division between sons, so conveniently breaking up troublesome vassals always has the imprimatur of legality. It'll be kind of funny if the greater success of Roman Law screws over the Roman Emperors.
811-815: Spanish Settlement
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Come 811, the Africans launched what Bãdalaréu hoped would be their finishing blows in Hispania. That it was becoming increasingly apparent his enemies in the peninsula had reached an accord and were beginning to coordinate their efforts to stave off Moorish hegemony was a development worthy of concern, but he was still confident of his chances at beating their collective might, even if he would prefer to move quickly enough to crush them separately. What alarmed him more were the reports from Duke Seraénu of an uptick of Islamic activity on the Libyan border, raids and scouting expeditions of such number and persistence that they could only be the prelude to a renewed Muslim invasion (mirroring the Islamic invasion of Mesopotamia which already began this year, but soon ran into the stone walls of Dara and Nisibis again): fighting that off would certainly require him to leave Hispania behind, so the Lord-King was determined to conclude hostilities on the peninsula victoriously as quickly as possible in order to free his forces up for another round with the Saracens.
To this end, the bulk of the African army left Toledo to finish off the new Tarracan kingdom to its northeast, after which Bãdalaréu intended to turn west to roll up the Lusitanians who would then be isolated from any hope of Aloysian intervention (diplomatic or otherwise). After wresting Valencia from the Tarracans and overcoming Adriano's much smaller army again in a fierce but short winter battle at Turboleta[1], the Dominus Rex himself drove right onward to Tarracona and Barcelona with 13,000 men, while detaching a robust division of 5,000 under Érreréyu to besiege Cèsaraugusta and also secure his western flank. Adriano didn't have the strength to hold Tarracona and thus fled the city which gave his kingdom its name for his actual capital, which the Africans had placed under siege by the end of spring. It must have seemed then, both to themselves and their rivals, that the Stilichians were but moments away from achieving a total victory in Hispania.
However, the rival Iberian kingdoms (and Aquitaine) were determined not to go down as easily as the fractious and unstable Visigoths had. Rather than foolishly attempt to immediately relieve Cèsaraugusta and Barcelona on his own, Viridomaro united his army – reinforced over the past winter with many new recruits raised in Lusitania proper – with that of Aznar Otsoa ('son of Lupo'), Prince of the Aquitani and Vascones (Esp.: 'Aznar López', Fra.: 'Asnard Lou') which, while still but a mosquito on its lonesome compared to the Moorish juggernaut, looked more impressive as part of a combined host with its western neighbor and was also fresh & well-rested on account of having remained entirely uncommitted to the War of the Gothic Succession prior to this point. This combined Lusitanian-Aquitani host forced Érreréyu to break off his siege of Cèsaraugusta and fall back to rejoin his father with the bad news: meanwhile Bãdalaréu had tried and failed to achieve another rapid victory at Barcelona by storming the city, and elected to fall back to a more favorable defensive position than risk getting caught between the allied forces outside Adriano's capital, what with his men's ranks having been worn down by attrition and further tired by winter campaigning.
A Tarraconensian mural commissioned by Adriano, depicting Bãdalaréu the Moor fleeing from before the walls of Barcelona in 811
After adding Adriano's strength to their own, the allied army followed the Africans to the lower course of the River Ebro (Lat.: 'Hiberus'), where they would fight one of the decisive engagements of the War of the Gothic Succession. The Battle of the Ebro was in truth less a singular clash between the two armies (who were more or less evenly matched in number now) and more a short campaign of multiple smaller battles fought around the great river over a few weeks in the summer of 811, beginning with the allies launching over-eager attacks as they arrived piecemeal upon finding that the great African host were still not done crossing south of the river thanks to their own great size. These attacks stung the Moors to be sure, but Bãdalaréu & Érreréyu successfully maintained discipline among their men and pulled off the retreat without overly heavy casualties; meanwhile for their part, once the bulk of the allied army had amassed on the Ebro's northern bank, the kings changed tactics and began attempts to cross the river themselves rather than try to wipe out the clearly prepared and well-armed Africans still on their side of it.
Now it was the Africans' turn to attack the allies as they crossed and try to crush their beach-heads piecemeal, while nearby fishermen's boats were commandeered and Tarracan engineers hurriedly built pontoon bridges to try to ferry as much of the allied army south of the Ebro as swiftly as humanly possible. In this the Moors were no less entirely successful than their adversaries had been at crushing them mid-retreat, and larger battles followed around Gandesa, La Venta de Camposines, Pinell and the high hills & low mountains of the Serra de la Fatarella, in addition to many rather intense skirmishes between each engagement. The allies gained the upper hand in the northern battles, the Aquitani light infantry proving to be especially helpful in the rough terrain around La Fatarella in particular, while the Africans' cavalry advantage continued to serve them well to the south.
In the end however, a combination of the allied forces gaining the upper hand around each contested area except Pinell and the arrival of two legions in Barcelona, ostensibly to support the Emperor's new father-in-law, got Bãdalaréu to blink first and order a withdrawal, which the Africans executed in an orderly manner. Still, he had gambled and lost, even if that loss was not as severe as it could've been. The allies meanwhile may not have crushed the Africans in the Battle of the Ebro, but they had staved off the worst possible outcome for non-Stilichians and proven there was still viability to Rosamund's partition scheme. Critically they won space and time to keep fighting against the Africans, who they and the Empress-Regent now hoped to expel from Toledo & to drive back – if not out of Hispania entirely – then at least to the confines of the old province of Baetica in the peninsula's far south.
A heavy and light infantryman of the Aquitani armies. Though even their more noble warriors would've amounted to medium infantry in other Christian armies, the Aquitani proved to be swift and ferocious warriors, adept at maneuvering through the mountains of northern Hispania and getting the drop on the more heavily-armed and cavalry-heavy Africans time & again
Elsewhere, in a less calamitous turn for the Aloysians' unstable fortunes, in understanding of the deteriorating situation on the continent and to more effectively oppose the escalating Viking raids plaguing their shores the Britons and English naturally grew closer. Now united beneath the standard of the Holy Roman Empire and by the former's conversion to Ionian Christianity, starting with Ríodam Artur VIII and Cyning Æthelbald the former rival kingdoms set aside their ancient grudges to begin coordinating responses to Norse reaving parties, lighting beacons and sending messages to one another's forts so that the other could send men over the border if needed – not to conquer or pillage, as was the norm in past centuries, but to help their fellow insular Christians fight off the reavers. In this manner the primary Latin and Germanic kingdoms of the Isle of Britain were able to mitigate the impact of Norse harassment on their shores, at least for the next few decades.
Deepening relations between the two also had the unintended side-effect of allowing the Pelagian Remnant to deepen its own reach into the underbelly of Anglo-Saxon society however. There the heretical teachings of Pelagius found some purchase among the sensibilities of the English commons, as far removed as they were from Rome & the other Ionian centers of power and inflamed by popular disapproval over more recent reforms to keep the English Church in line with continental practices (such as the calculations for Easter and the style of monastic tonsuring) rather than with the traditions developed on the isles by the Celts and adopted by the early English Christians, considered erroneous by the central clerical authorities – all issues in which the Pelagians were now the only ones still holding to the old insular customs. Pelagian theology's extreme emphasis on human free will also appealed to those Englishmen who aspired to alter or escape their destiny or wyrd, a pagan concept which had survived Christianization. In any case while the Pelagians viewed the Vikings as a threat for obvious reasons, they would also come to consider the pagan reavers an opportunity to cast down their oppressors as the century wore on…
A British knight supports his English allies in their skirmish with a Viking raiding party
Early in 812, Bãdalaréu issued a public condemnation of the Emperor's apparent growing involvement in the War of the Gothic Succession and cautioned the legions deployed to Barcelona to not interfere any further with the conflict. Outwardly it seemed that his threats were heeded, since the two legions indeed did not leave the city nor would they have been sufficient to decisively tilt the balance in the allies' favor, but in truth Rosamund didn't even have any actual intention of doing more than intimidating the Africans into backing away from their next biggest prize after Toledo and keeping her new set of pawns in contention anyway. That objective had been reached, and she could now count on said pawns to do all the actual fighting against the Moors: with some luck, they'd force the Stilichian forces back within the confines of Baetica all on their own and she could impose her partition plan as a fait accompli.
In that regard, the Empress-Regent enjoyed some encouraging signs. Bound by a common desire not to fall under African domination, the allies worked surprisingly well together and managed to overcome the Moorish army twice more this year, in spite of each battle being more challenging than the last: at the Battle of Bílbilis[2] they managed to expel the Africans from the Ebro Valley and secure a less troublesome connection between Lusitania & Tarraco than through the northern mountains, and afterward they pressed the Africans & those Goths who had signed up with the latter to Caracca[3] where they achieved another triumph. However, the African defense only grew stronger and more determined as they came closer to Toledo, where Arroderéyu had come to join his father with additional reinforcements from Baetica itself. Aznar's, Viridomaro's and Adriano's hopes of recapturing the Gothic capital were dashed when Bãdalaréu achieved his own victory over them in the Battle of Compluto[4], smashing every attempt of theirs to ford the Henares River and eventually routing their forces in a fierce counterattack once the allies had exhausted themselves.
Seesawing aside, both the Aloysians and Stilichians would soon find the Islamic thorn in their side could not only no longer be ignored, but painful enough to force them to take their eyes off the ball in Hispania. The army of Burhan al-Din and the new Caliph Ali seemingly broke off its siege of Nisibis this year and retreated a ways to the east, encouraging the Ghassanids and Romans to pursue in hopes that they'd again been weakened by disease like at Antioch a few years prior. Alas, the retreat turned out to be a feint on the part of Burhan to draw the Christians onto more favorable ground for him to fight them on, and he found it around the ruins of the long-abandoned Persian and Eftal fortress of Sarbane ('Sisauranon' to the Romans), which had been since successively devastated by the Romans, Turks and his own master's ancestors. Burhan took the risk of inviting a Roman assault on his comparatively smaller army atop the hill where Sarbane used to stand, flying the Caliphal green standard to ensure the Romans would take the bait (for it represented a golden opportunity to take the enemy ruler captive), while substantial reinforcements in the form of a secondary army under Ala ud-Din managed to cross the nearby wadis feeding the Khabur while they were dry and now crept up on the Romans' flank.
That the Roman army managed to extract itself from the ensuing slaughter without being totally annihilated was considered a miracle by the regency and the Rhangabes both, for which they had to thank the savage bravery of their Bulgar rearguard. However, the cost of what they called the Battle of Sisauranon had been severe – the Ghassanid king and Rosamund's second son-in-law Jabalah IX did not survive, having insisted on taking the honor of commanding the vanguard and thus inevitably getting crushed when the Arab trap closed, and neither did Count Herakleios Rhangabe, who was badly injured by a Turkic ghulam lancer while coordinating the retreat and died shortly after making it back to Nisibis. Since Jabalah's son with the Roman imperial princess Marcia, al-Mundhir V, was only eight years old at the time, it fell to his mother Arwa bint Sirhan (herself a representative of the Banu Kalb, who used to govern Palaestina before it was overrun by the Muslims during the reign of Aloysius II and had since effectively been folded into the Ghassanid ranks) to rally the defense.
The Cilician Bulgars of the Romans' easternmost army marshaling to cover Herakleios Rhangabe's retreat from the disaster at Sisauranon
Meanwhile in Egypt, Husam al-Din launched his Libyan offensive this year, having waited a bit longer than he would have liked to assemble replacements (mostly drawn from the Banu Hilal tribe, who had only begun to migrate to Egypt late in the previous century) for the contingent he sent down the Nile to contain the Nubians. Duke Seraénu thwarted the first Saracen incursion past the border in the First Battle of Anabucis (technically the Second if one counts this Roman-Arab war as a direct part and not merely a continuation of the previous one), but was beaten by Husam's main host almost immediately afterward in the Second Battle of Anabucis. The Africans were beaten again at Ésgéna[5], rallied to push the Muslims back some outside of Magomades-Baéranta[6] and were dealt a final grievous defeat at Sagazoena east of Ésgéna, after which Seraénu had no choice but to pull all the way back to Oea in the face of the greater Saracen numbers. Husam al-Din pursued and harried him every step of the way and ended the year by beginning to besiege Oea, while Seraénu sent word to his Stilichian in-laws of the predicament he had found himself in and appealed for immediate assistance lest their gains in Libya from the Peace of Samosata be entirely reversed.
Romanus III reached his eighteenth birthday in 813, at which point his mother and the rest of his regency council elected to declare that he had attained his majority and must begin to rule in his own right (though of course they would linger as his advisors going forward). In practice, between ancient Roman custom dictating that a boy became a man when he removed his bulla charm and donned the toga virilis ('toga of manhood') around 16 and the canon law of the Church proclaiming that the age of majority was 18, there was no consistent rule governing the age at which a previously-underage monarch would be considered an adult capable of ruling on his own at this time: some will be proclaimed to have attained their majority before the age of 18, while others must suffer regents into their 20s. In any case, Romanus would have his work cut out for him almost immediately, so that drawing a firm line between adolescence and adulthood would be the furthest thing from his mind.
First order of business for the young Emperor was bringing an end to the chaos in Hispania, which would serve as the first true test of his abilities and an indicator of how he was going to govern. Romanus, aware that his being a beardless fat youth who struggled to climb into his horse's saddle (and that said horse had to be an especially large and strong one, even by the standards of imperial warhorses, just to carry his massive frame) was unlikely to inspire fear or respect in much older hardened veterans such as Bãdalaréu, marched down into the peninsula with nearly the full strength of the Treverian army at his back (the Danubian legions still being needed where they were both in case Isaac Khagan broke his treaty with Rome, and to keep the South Slavs from doing too much damage to each other or surrounding lands since Romanus had no time to mediate their disputes right now) and an additional few thousand Germanic auxiliaries (mostly supplied by his Lombard kindred) instead. By the time he arrived at Barcelona to join the two legions he had sent years ahead of himself, not only had his wife Joana given birth to their first child – a daughter named Viviana (Fra.: 'Viveane') – he found that the conflict had ground to an almost total halt, with the Africans and their allied rivals having failed to break past the other's belt of castles & local allies among the Gothic magnates across north-central Hispania.
Surprising many, Romanus did not lead the imperial army in an immediate attack on the Moors, a feat which he was worried about his own ability to pull off successfully anyway since he was as inexperienced at warfare as his father had been when Caliph Hussein first attacked the Holy Roman Empire, while Bãdalaréu was a highly experienced war leader with a still-respectable army behind him. Instead the Augustus Imperator used the presence of his host and the mutual exhaustion of the warring parties to bring them all to the peace table in Valencia, and in a further demonstration of wisdom beyond his years, did not insist on trying to enforce his mother's partition plan to the letter – something which the Africans certainly would have revolted against, since they still held much land outside of the old Baetic borders. Stressing the importance of unity in the Holy Roman Empire against Muslim encroachment, which threatened not just the Empire's few remaining Syrian & Mesopotamian holdings but also the African heartland, Romanus persuaded the combatants to conclude the War of the Gothic Succession and accept the borders they had been able to secure with the sword. To Bãdalaréu he made an appeal, if not quite to the Stilichians' traditionally redoubtable sense of duty to Rome and willingness to prioritize the good of the Empire over their own interests, then at least to their duty to defend their subjects from death and slavery beneath the Saracen yoke: in this endeavor the young and optimistic Emperor found much-needed support from Prince Érreréyu, who was not of a mind to leave his father-in-law to die in Oea.
Flavius Romanus Augustus Tertius at the start of his reign proper. If his father's chief vice was greed, his was unmistakably gluttony, earning him the unflattering nickname 'The Fat'. That aside, Romanus was a jolly man who had some of Constantine's administrative aptitude and martial determination to go with his diplomatic mind – his better qualities were just (perhaps unfairly) overshadowed by his gut
Thus the Stilichians now found themselves confirmed in possession of most of the Gothic lands south of the Sierra de Guadarrama, from where the allies had been unable to expel their northernmost garrisons – quite a bit more territory than the former borders of Baetica held, indeed this settlement effectively left them in control of most of the great eastern-central province of Carthaginensis (including Cartagena itself, meaning Africa now controlled the hometowns of both the fallen Teodofredo and Bermudo). The Lusitanians were able to secure just about the entirety of the old province of Lusitania, including Emérida and Paca[7]: Viridomaro moved his court from Braga (as Bracara Augusta was now called in both Espanesco and Lusitana) to the former city, which was only fitting since it was the old provincial capital, and strove to terminate the Celtiberian tradition of electing their kings in favor of monopolizing the crown within his family (henceforth referred to as the 'House of Braga' after their old seat), under the guise of finalizing their Romanization and imitating the Blood of Saint Jude. This left Adriano in command of the peninsula's northeast, spanning much but not all of ancient Tarraconensis and chunks of Carthaginensis as well: his Kingdom of Tarraco was now definitively bounded by the Asturian & Cantabrian Mountains to the northwest, the Sierra de Gredos & Sierra de Guadarrama to the southwest, and the River Júcar (Lat.: 'Sucro') to the south. His own descendants will remember him as Adrià I in their divergent northeastern or 'Tarraconensian'[8] (Tar.: Tàrraconensç) tongue, a sort of midpoint between Espanesco and Gallique.
By arranging the Peace of Valencia, Romanus had demonstrated the diplomatic acumen which would be his primary tool throughout his reign, and had achieved a feat which in all probability should have gotten him a better nickname in the history books than 'Romanus the Fat'. He had ended the War of the Gothic Succession and, while unable to expel the Africans from Hispania or even confine them to Baetica, still managed to keep about half of the old Gothic kingdom out of their hands and elevate the other Iberian kingdoms (including one led by an Aloysian cadet branch which, fortunately, had proven more loyal than the House of Valois) to a point where they could contain any further Moorish expansion. In short, while unable to wholly prevent the expansion of Stilichian power, he at least managed to contain it after entering so late in the game and avert the worst-case scenario of Carthage ruling most of Hispania (in fact, their new Spanish domains still fell short of the old Carthage's zone of influence on the peninsula before the Second Punic War). That done however, he immediately had to turn his attention to the east, where the Muslims were surging against both Seraénu in Libya and the fading Ghassanids in Mesopotamia. The Roman army left Valencia's port with the Stilichian host in Hispania following them, not as enemies but as allies & vassals, to collect the Carthaginian legions and with them, rescue the former and rout Husam al-Din in the Battle of Oea before the end of the year. This however was only the beginning of the young Emperor's military career, as larger and more difficult battles lay ahead in Mesopotamia.
Viridomaro proclaims that his new Lusitanian kingdom is here to stay, and has secured a lot more of old Roman Lusitania than the Tarraconensians managed in the east, to his cheering warriors
While Romanus had gotten his proper reign off to a good start in 813, 814 would be a year which demonstrated to the Augustus Imperator his limitations and the considerable room to grow (as a ruler, and not merely physically) which he still had. After leaving the Africans to defend Africa, he sailed for Antioch, and arrived to find the Mideastern situation had continued to slowly deteriorate in the preceding years. Duke Elpidios had failed in his efforts to relieve Dara & Nisibis, first through direct means and then with what was intended to be a diversionary attack into Islamic Syria. The latter had since bogged down and was ultimately reversed at a sharp cost to the Romans in the Banī-ʻUlaym Mountains[9] in large part due to the influx of Arab tribes, certainly including the one which gave that mountain range its new name, as garrisons installed by the late Hussein to lock the region down.
After overcoming what remained of his seasickness, Romanus rode with the Duke to once again try to relieve his Mesopotamian forces, thwarting an early attempt by Burhan al-Din to stop them in the Battle of Taftanaz. With their greatly reinforced numbers, the Romans defeated the Saracens twice more at Serugh[10] and Marida[11], finally reaching Dara near the end of summer. There, however, Caliph Ali & Burhan al-Din had drawn up the full might of the Caliphate, even depleting the siege lines around Nisibis for the decisive battle they had planned. The Muslims cleverly dug ditches and further surrounded them with caltrops not only to trap any Roman cavalrymen who unwisely charged into them, but also to funnel the Roman troops into chokepoints where they could more effectively be contained and defeated. Romanus fared little better than his father had when the latter was fighting real battles for the first time and wound up retreating in defeat after days of fierce but futile fighting.
Queen Arwa of the Ghassanids was not deterred by news of this defeat and resolved to continue holding out in Nisibis, where she still had enough supplies to last another year, but the defenders of Dara were not so steely-spined. Having been unable to sally forth and attack their Arab besiegers from behind while their Emperor was defeated on account of the blocking force left to watch over the city gates under Ala ud-Din, the demoralized garrison surrendered to Ali and Burhan a few days after the battle, leaving Nisibis more isolated than ever before. Romanus was infuriated at this second defeat compounding his first great one, but could not do a whole lot to reverse it immediately: rather than allow the Battle of Dara to get his spirits down, he resolved to look to the future and reorganize his forces for another attempt to relieve Nisibis, or at least to create an opportunity for the Ghassanids to break out of their now almost-certainly-doomed stronghold and fall back to less vulnerable positions along the remaining Roman lines.
Roman forces attempting to bypass the Arabs' traps & field fortifications running smack-dab into Burhan al-Din's prepared blocking forces on unfavorable ground near Dara
The defeat in Upper Mesopotamia was not Romanus' only woe this year. His removal of most of the Treverian legions to first impose a conclusion to the War of the Gothic Succession, and then to fight all the way in the northern Levant, predictably left the northwestern edge of his empire vulnerable to Viking raids – and the Vikings themselves would have been fools to pass up the opportunity, especially as the Britons and Anglo-Saxons were both doing better at countering them recently. Probing attacks struck the Frisian and Belgic[12] coasts early this year, and finding resistance to be largely local and uncoordinated, escalated to larger reaving expeditions over the course of 814. While none of the Norsemen were bold, strong or suicidal enough to attempt to sail against Trévere directly (yet), they did pillage many smaller remote hamlets & monasteries around the northwestern marshes, and also notably sacked the growing port town of Bruges (although they were unable to overcome its Roman castle, where most of the civilian populace found refuge). Upon receiving reports of these crimes, Romanus cursed the Norsemen and swore he'd get even with them, but that would have to wait until after he could extract himself from the East.
In the distant Orient, far away from the struggles of the Romans and Saracens, the rival Chinese dynasties of Later Liang and True Han had spent the past decades putting their lands back together after the outpouring of blood and chaos that had accompanied the fall of the Later Han. Aside from repairing roads, dikes, and fortifications which had been damaged in the great war, clearing out bandits and resettling devastated regions, a mutual agreement had been reached between the northern & southern courts to repair and maintain the Grand Canal built by said Later Han, something which benefited both empires greatly and facilitated trade up and down the Middle Kingdom. Now while both the aging Huanzong and Dezu were determined that, as there was only one Sun in Heaven, there can only be one Son of Heaven below, there was another area in which they could cooperate to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome: an alliance against the Tibetans who still occupied Chengdu and a good chunk of western China with it, the so-called 'Country of Heaven'. Of course, while both dynasties wanted the barbarians out of what they considered an integral Chinese territory, coming to an agreement over how to divide Ba-Shu between themselves was a much thornier task.
In 815 Romanus mounted his second effort to relieve the Siege of Nisibis, having received word from the defenders that they couldn't hold out for much longer on account of their dwindling food supplies (depleted as it was after having to survive three sieges in rapid succession). After regrouping and marshaling reinforcements from both the Caucasian kingdoms (relieved of the Khazar threat) and Africa (both his Carthaginian legions and Moorish auxiliaries captained by Érreréyu), the Roman army set out for Nisibis and was confronted by Burhan al-Din, backed up with the majority of the Islamic army, south of the fallen Dara on a plain which the Greek legionaries of Romanus' host called 'Solachon'. The Roman battle-plan as devised by Duke Elpidios called for the immediate & forceful usage of their cavalry, who were to utilize the flat battlefield to their maximal advantage, so as to put their Saracen counterpart to flight and serve as a spearhead for a general Roman assault. Romanus, still smarting from his defeat at Dara, signed off on this strategy with the expectation that they'd sweep the Arabs from the field before Burhan would have any time to engineer any clever defenses.
Burhan's own plan called for a classic feigned retreat by his light cavalry, which would draw the Romans into a trap whereupon the majority of his army would descend on their flanks. However, the numbers and ferocity behind the Roman assault turned his men's feigned retreat into a real one, and as the larger Roman army fanned out it threatened to roll up his flanking divisions as well. Lead elements of the Roman chivalry surged as far as the Arab camp and Elpidios' gambit had nearly paid off when Caliph Ali surprised his own generalissimo and waded into the fray with his elite Qaraghilman – the imperial household guard of the Hashemite Caliphs, whose very name (a mixture of Turkic and Arabic) indicated their overwhelmingly Turkic background in service to the obviously Arab descendants of Muhammad – backing him up. This display of courage from their hitherto-unassuming ruler and the presence of the Hashemite green standard inspired the wavering Muslim troops to return to the fight with all that they had, and soon they had reversed the tide and seemed to be on the verge of driving the Romans from Solachon in a rout.
Caliph Ali ibn Hussein, in whom the warlike spirit of Muhammad and his immediate successors had reawakened after being absent from the last few Hashemite generations, preparing to lead his household guard into the fray and stabilize his wavering lines at Solachon
But it was at this time that Romanus himself stepped up, not merely committing the Roman reserve but also furiously meeting Ali and the Qaraghilman in combat with his own paladins and exhorting his faltering legions to keep fighting beneath the blue-and-white Aloysian banner which proclaimed Christ's victory. Both young monarchs (comparatively – Ali had a decade over Romanus) evidently did not lack for bravery, and were noted to respectively get their scimitar and mace dirty as the Battle of Solachon degenerated into a frantic, blood-soaked melee. Ultimately the Caliph was wounded by an intrepid knight's lance and had to fall back to recuperate, but his soldiers obeyed his command not to follow him at any cost and the two armies wound up mutually breaking off combat to withdraw to their camps sometime after sunset. After taking account of their rather heavy losses, the two monarchs agreed overnight to negotiate a short truce and decide the fate of Nisibis around a table rather than try to kill each other the next morning.
Since the Muslims had bled slightly less than the Christians and had yet to abandon the field, it soon became apparent to Romanus that there would be no way to get them to move out of his path without a second day of battle, which clearly was not without its risks and would be costly even in victory. If he lost, it was curtains for Nisibis; and even if he didn't, there was a chance that Ala ud-Din would be able to take the stronghold city with the Arabs' reserve army (with which he was conducting the siege in Burhan's absence), which Ali managed to bluff him into thinking was about to receive reinforcements from Persia. However, neither would Romanus forsake the Ghassanids so easily, and he still had strength enough to make a rematch as dangerous a proposition for the Caliphate as it was for him.
Ultimately Romanus agreed to give up Nisibis for the time being, but Ali agreed to let Arwa and the Ghassanid court & defenders leave for the Roman lines with their arms, armor, horses and honor intact; furthermore he would not sack the city when he took possession of it and would even treat those members of the garrison left behind due to severe illness or injury at his own expense. The Romans and Arabs further agreed to six months' truce to rest & rebuild their armies before inevitably resuming hostilities sometime in the later half of 816. Despite being enemy monarchs and a comically mismatched pair – the stick-thin, thickly bearded and stern Ali making for a razor-sharp contrast to obese, beardless and perpetually smiling Romanus – the duo also began to cultivate one of history's stranger friendships in the inconclusive aftermath of the Battle of Solachon, founded on a newly-gained mutual respect for each other's courage in the fighting (even if it would never be enough to keep them from going to war with each other from time to time).
Arwa bint Sirhan, in whom the Christian Arabs had found their last echo of ancient Arab warrior-queens like the fourth-century Mavia, leading the defeated but unbroken Ghassanids to the safety of the Roman lines and Edessa, their last great bastion
North of the Roman world and its struggles, the Vikings met one of their earliest reversals in Ireland when Jarl Røgnvaldr, fighting as part of the Dál Riatan army under his nominal sovereign & employer Óengus III, was defeated by the warriors of Ulaid in the Battle of Ráth Mór[13]. As a consequence, the Dál nAraidi vassals of the Dál Riatan over-kingdom who governed this region switched their allegiance to Óengus' victorious Dál Fiatach rivals, thereby costing the island kingdom its foothold on the larger Emerald Isle. Óengus was not as upset over the loss as he would normally have been however, since it proved to him that the dreaded pagan Norse who had so far dared to boss him around in his own keep could be beaten in battle and motivated him to begin plotting a coup to remove their hold over him. Røgnvaldr did himself and his people no favors, as he insisted on increasing the tribute paid by the Dál Riatans even though he & his Vikings had just lost a major battle. In a sign of his growing defiance, Óengus aided and abetted the Culdee monks of Iona in transferring their saints' relics to Ireland (eventually ending up in the safekeeping of the Kings of Munster and their formidable Rock of Cashel, a fortress far outside the Vikings' reach) for fear that the Norse might make good on their threats to desecrate said relics if the monastery couldn't meet the heightened demand for tribute.
Meanwhile, the Later Liang and True Han continued their negotiations for an alliance against the Tibetans throughout 815. Possession of Chengdu remained a sore point between the two dynasties, and it took until the year was almost half-done for Dezu to concede that it should go to the Liang along with northern Ba-Shu, while the south and the Nanzhong territories were rightfully his. However, the Southern Emperor intended to race the Liang forces for the great western city anyway, and if his men happened to take it before Huanzong's did – well, he certainly wasn't going to just hand it over, regardless of what he was saying through diplomatic channels now. After all, even the paragon Liu Bei was not above subterfuge, as his failed plot to assassinate Cao Cao while working for the latter and subsequent defection to Yuan Shao only to then abandon the latter after the Battle of Guandu attested; why now should Liu Dan pass up a great opportunity to strengthen himself at his primary opponent's expense?
In any case the Emperor of True Han would not actively lead his scheme, instead leaving that duty to his now-grown eldest son Liu Xuan, Prince of Han, with the elderly but still formidable Prince of Chu providing guidance while he was busy building a clock tower in Hangzhou. Huanzong, being the greater soldier between the two Emperors, would still lead his own army against the Tibetans despite also getting on in years. The Tibetan Emperor Tritsuk Löntsen, whose own hair was starting to turn gray by 815, tried and failed to persuade either Chinese dynasty to attack the other with his support instead of pressing on against Chengdu, and thus prepared to defend his own empire's easternmost possessions against a total of 650,000 Chinese soldiers pressing in on it from all sides. He summoned reinforcements from every corner of his dominion and all of his vassals to help him with this task, including the Indo-Romans in the distant west, but even at his full strength he had at his disposal fewer than half of the juggernaut hosts which the Chinese were throwing at him, and despite triumphing against both the Liang & True Han's first few probing attacks at the war's outset they would not stop coming at him with their overwhelming numbers: Tibetan sages likened this war to fighting a mountain from their homeland.
A Later Liang cataphract contending with a mercenary Uyghur horse-archer and an Indo-Roman heavy horseman from Tocharia on the plains of Ba-Shu
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[1] Teruel.
[2] Augusta Bilbilis – Calatayud.
[3] Arriaca – Guadalajara, Castilla-La Mancha.
[4] Complutum – Alcalá de Henares.
[5] Iscina – Madina Sultan, east of Sirte.
[6] Macomades Euphranta – Sirte.
[7] Pax Augusta – Beja, Portugal.
[8] Equivalent to Old Catalan.
[9] Jabal Zawiya.
[10] Suruç.
[11] Mardin.
[12] Referring to not quite modern Belgium, but a larger area including it as well as the southernmost parts of the Netherlands & far northern France.
[13] Now part of Antrim.
To this end, the bulk of the African army left Toledo to finish off the new Tarracan kingdom to its northeast, after which Bãdalaréu intended to turn west to roll up the Lusitanians who would then be isolated from any hope of Aloysian intervention (diplomatic or otherwise). After wresting Valencia from the Tarracans and overcoming Adriano's much smaller army again in a fierce but short winter battle at Turboleta[1], the Dominus Rex himself drove right onward to Tarracona and Barcelona with 13,000 men, while detaching a robust division of 5,000 under Érreréyu to besiege Cèsaraugusta and also secure his western flank. Adriano didn't have the strength to hold Tarracona and thus fled the city which gave his kingdom its name for his actual capital, which the Africans had placed under siege by the end of spring. It must have seemed then, both to themselves and their rivals, that the Stilichians were but moments away from achieving a total victory in Hispania.
However, the rival Iberian kingdoms (and Aquitaine) were determined not to go down as easily as the fractious and unstable Visigoths had. Rather than foolishly attempt to immediately relieve Cèsaraugusta and Barcelona on his own, Viridomaro united his army – reinforced over the past winter with many new recruits raised in Lusitania proper – with that of Aznar Otsoa ('son of Lupo'), Prince of the Aquitani and Vascones (Esp.: 'Aznar López', Fra.: 'Asnard Lou') which, while still but a mosquito on its lonesome compared to the Moorish juggernaut, looked more impressive as part of a combined host with its western neighbor and was also fresh & well-rested on account of having remained entirely uncommitted to the War of the Gothic Succession prior to this point. This combined Lusitanian-Aquitani host forced Érreréyu to break off his siege of Cèsaraugusta and fall back to rejoin his father with the bad news: meanwhile Bãdalaréu had tried and failed to achieve another rapid victory at Barcelona by storming the city, and elected to fall back to a more favorable defensive position than risk getting caught between the allied forces outside Adriano's capital, what with his men's ranks having been worn down by attrition and further tired by winter campaigning.
A Tarraconensian mural commissioned by Adriano, depicting Bãdalaréu the Moor fleeing from before the walls of Barcelona in 811
After adding Adriano's strength to their own, the allied army followed the Africans to the lower course of the River Ebro (Lat.: 'Hiberus'), where they would fight one of the decisive engagements of the War of the Gothic Succession. The Battle of the Ebro was in truth less a singular clash between the two armies (who were more or less evenly matched in number now) and more a short campaign of multiple smaller battles fought around the great river over a few weeks in the summer of 811, beginning with the allies launching over-eager attacks as they arrived piecemeal upon finding that the great African host were still not done crossing south of the river thanks to their own great size. These attacks stung the Moors to be sure, but Bãdalaréu & Érreréyu successfully maintained discipline among their men and pulled off the retreat without overly heavy casualties; meanwhile for their part, once the bulk of the allied army had amassed on the Ebro's northern bank, the kings changed tactics and began attempts to cross the river themselves rather than try to wipe out the clearly prepared and well-armed Africans still on their side of it.
Now it was the Africans' turn to attack the allies as they crossed and try to crush their beach-heads piecemeal, while nearby fishermen's boats were commandeered and Tarracan engineers hurriedly built pontoon bridges to try to ferry as much of the allied army south of the Ebro as swiftly as humanly possible. In this the Moors were no less entirely successful than their adversaries had been at crushing them mid-retreat, and larger battles followed around Gandesa, La Venta de Camposines, Pinell and the high hills & low mountains of the Serra de la Fatarella, in addition to many rather intense skirmishes between each engagement. The allies gained the upper hand in the northern battles, the Aquitani light infantry proving to be especially helpful in the rough terrain around La Fatarella in particular, while the Africans' cavalry advantage continued to serve them well to the south.
In the end however, a combination of the allied forces gaining the upper hand around each contested area except Pinell and the arrival of two legions in Barcelona, ostensibly to support the Emperor's new father-in-law, got Bãdalaréu to blink first and order a withdrawal, which the Africans executed in an orderly manner. Still, he had gambled and lost, even if that loss was not as severe as it could've been. The allies meanwhile may not have crushed the Africans in the Battle of the Ebro, but they had staved off the worst possible outcome for non-Stilichians and proven there was still viability to Rosamund's partition scheme. Critically they won space and time to keep fighting against the Africans, who they and the Empress-Regent now hoped to expel from Toledo & to drive back – if not out of Hispania entirely – then at least to the confines of the old province of Baetica in the peninsula's far south.
A heavy and light infantryman of the Aquitani armies. Though even their more noble warriors would've amounted to medium infantry in other Christian armies, the Aquitani proved to be swift and ferocious warriors, adept at maneuvering through the mountains of northern Hispania and getting the drop on the more heavily-armed and cavalry-heavy Africans time & again
Elsewhere, in a less calamitous turn for the Aloysians' unstable fortunes, in understanding of the deteriorating situation on the continent and to more effectively oppose the escalating Viking raids plaguing their shores the Britons and English naturally grew closer. Now united beneath the standard of the Holy Roman Empire and by the former's conversion to Ionian Christianity, starting with Ríodam Artur VIII and Cyning Æthelbald the former rival kingdoms set aside their ancient grudges to begin coordinating responses to Norse reaving parties, lighting beacons and sending messages to one another's forts so that the other could send men over the border if needed – not to conquer or pillage, as was the norm in past centuries, but to help their fellow insular Christians fight off the reavers. In this manner the primary Latin and Germanic kingdoms of the Isle of Britain were able to mitigate the impact of Norse harassment on their shores, at least for the next few decades.
Deepening relations between the two also had the unintended side-effect of allowing the Pelagian Remnant to deepen its own reach into the underbelly of Anglo-Saxon society however. There the heretical teachings of Pelagius found some purchase among the sensibilities of the English commons, as far removed as they were from Rome & the other Ionian centers of power and inflamed by popular disapproval over more recent reforms to keep the English Church in line with continental practices (such as the calculations for Easter and the style of monastic tonsuring) rather than with the traditions developed on the isles by the Celts and adopted by the early English Christians, considered erroneous by the central clerical authorities – all issues in which the Pelagians were now the only ones still holding to the old insular customs. Pelagian theology's extreme emphasis on human free will also appealed to those Englishmen who aspired to alter or escape their destiny or wyrd, a pagan concept which had survived Christianization. In any case while the Pelagians viewed the Vikings as a threat for obvious reasons, they would also come to consider the pagan reavers an opportunity to cast down their oppressors as the century wore on…
A British knight supports his English allies in their skirmish with a Viking raiding party
Early in 812, Bãdalaréu issued a public condemnation of the Emperor's apparent growing involvement in the War of the Gothic Succession and cautioned the legions deployed to Barcelona to not interfere any further with the conflict. Outwardly it seemed that his threats were heeded, since the two legions indeed did not leave the city nor would they have been sufficient to decisively tilt the balance in the allies' favor, but in truth Rosamund didn't even have any actual intention of doing more than intimidating the Africans into backing away from their next biggest prize after Toledo and keeping her new set of pawns in contention anyway. That objective had been reached, and she could now count on said pawns to do all the actual fighting against the Moors: with some luck, they'd force the Stilichian forces back within the confines of Baetica all on their own and she could impose her partition plan as a fait accompli.
In that regard, the Empress-Regent enjoyed some encouraging signs. Bound by a common desire not to fall under African domination, the allies worked surprisingly well together and managed to overcome the Moorish army twice more this year, in spite of each battle being more challenging than the last: at the Battle of Bílbilis[2] they managed to expel the Africans from the Ebro Valley and secure a less troublesome connection between Lusitania & Tarraco than through the northern mountains, and afterward they pressed the Africans & those Goths who had signed up with the latter to Caracca[3] where they achieved another triumph. However, the African defense only grew stronger and more determined as they came closer to Toledo, where Arroderéyu had come to join his father with additional reinforcements from Baetica itself. Aznar's, Viridomaro's and Adriano's hopes of recapturing the Gothic capital were dashed when Bãdalaréu achieved his own victory over them in the Battle of Compluto[4], smashing every attempt of theirs to ford the Henares River and eventually routing their forces in a fierce counterattack once the allies had exhausted themselves.
Seesawing aside, both the Aloysians and Stilichians would soon find the Islamic thorn in their side could not only no longer be ignored, but painful enough to force them to take their eyes off the ball in Hispania. The army of Burhan al-Din and the new Caliph Ali seemingly broke off its siege of Nisibis this year and retreated a ways to the east, encouraging the Ghassanids and Romans to pursue in hopes that they'd again been weakened by disease like at Antioch a few years prior. Alas, the retreat turned out to be a feint on the part of Burhan to draw the Christians onto more favorable ground for him to fight them on, and he found it around the ruins of the long-abandoned Persian and Eftal fortress of Sarbane ('Sisauranon' to the Romans), which had been since successively devastated by the Romans, Turks and his own master's ancestors. Burhan took the risk of inviting a Roman assault on his comparatively smaller army atop the hill where Sarbane used to stand, flying the Caliphal green standard to ensure the Romans would take the bait (for it represented a golden opportunity to take the enemy ruler captive), while substantial reinforcements in the form of a secondary army under Ala ud-Din managed to cross the nearby wadis feeding the Khabur while they were dry and now crept up on the Romans' flank.
That the Roman army managed to extract itself from the ensuing slaughter without being totally annihilated was considered a miracle by the regency and the Rhangabes both, for which they had to thank the savage bravery of their Bulgar rearguard. However, the cost of what they called the Battle of Sisauranon had been severe – the Ghassanid king and Rosamund's second son-in-law Jabalah IX did not survive, having insisted on taking the honor of commanding the vanguard and thus inevitably getting crushed when the Arab trap closed, and neither did Count Herakleios Rhangabe, who was badly injured by a Turkic ghulam lancer while coordinating the retreat and died shortly after making it back to Nisibis. Since Jabalah's son with the Roman imperial princess Marcia, al-Mundhir V, was only eight years old at the time, it fell to his mother Arwa bint Sirhan (herself a representative of the Banu Kalb, who used to govern Palaestina before it was overrun by the Muslims during the reign of Aloysius II and had since effectively been folded into the Ghassanid ranks) to rally the defense.
The Cilician Bulgars of the Romans' easternmost army marshaling to cover Herakleios Rhangabe's retreat from the disaster at Sisauranon
Meanwhile in Egypt, Husam al-Din launched his Libyan offensive this year, having waited a bit longer than he would have liked to assemble replacements (mostly drawn from the Banu Hilal tribe, who had only begun to migrate to Egypt late in the previous century) for the contingent he sent down the Nile to contain the Nubians. Duke Seraénu thwarted the first Saracen incursion past the border in the First Battle of Anabucis (technically the Second if one counts this Roman-Arab war as a direct part and not merely a continuation of the previous one), but was beaten by Husam's main host almost immediately afterward in the Second Battle of Anabucis. The Africans were beaten again at Ésgéna[5], rallied to push the Muslims back some outside of Magomades-Baéranta[6] and were dealt a final grievous defeat at Sagazoena east of Ésgéna, after which Seraénu had no choice but to pull all the way back to Oea in the face of the greater Saracen numbers. Husam al-Din pursued and harried him every step of the way and ended the year by beginning to besiege Oea, while Seraénu sent word to his Stilichian in-laws of the predicament he had found himself in and appealed for immediate assistance lest their gains in Libya from the Peace of Samosata be entirely reversed.
Romanus III reached his eighteenth birthday in 813, at which point his mother and the rest of his regency council elected to declare that he had attained his majority and must begin to rule in his own right (though of course they would linger as his advisors going forward). In practice, between ancient Roman custom dictating that a boy became a man when he removed his bulla charm and donned the toga virilis ('toga of manhood') around 16 and the canon law of the Church proclaiming that the age of majority was 18, there was no consistent rule governing the age at which a previously-underage monarch would be considered an adult capable of ruling on his own at this time: some will be proclaimed to have attained their majority before the age of 18, while others must suffer regents into their 20s. In any case, Romanus would have his work cut out for him almost immediately, so that drawing a firm line between adolescence and adulthood would be the furthest thing from his mind.
First order of business for the young Emperor was bringing an end to the chaos in Hispania, which would serve as the first true test of his abilities and an indicator of how he was going to govern. Romanus, aware that his being a beardless fat youth who struggled to climb into his horse's saddle (and that said horse had to be an especially large and strong one, even by the standards of imperial warhorses, just to carry his massive frame) was unlikely to inspire fear or respect in much older hardened veterans such as Bãdalaréu, marched down into the peninsula with nearly the full strength of the Treverian army at his back (the Danubian legions still being needed where they were both in case Isaac Khagan broke his treaty with Rome, and to keep the South Slavs from doing too much damage to each other or surrounding lands since Romanus had no time to mediate their disputes right now) and an additional few thousand Germanic auxiliaries (mostly supplied by his Lombard kindred) instead. By the time he arrived at Barcelona to join the two legions he had sent years ahead of himself, not only had his wife Joana given birth to their first child – a daughter named Viviana (Fra.: 'Viveane') – he found that the conflict had ground to an almost total halt, with the Africans and their allied rivals having failed to break past the other's belt of castles & local allies among the Gothic magnates across north-central Hispania.
Surprising many, Romanus did not lead the imperial army in an immediate attack on the Moors, a feat which he was worried about his own ability to pull off successfully anyway since he was as inexperienced at warfare as his father had been when Caliph Hussein first attacked the Holy Roman Empire, while Bãdalaréu was a highly experienced war leader with a still-respectable army behind him. Instead the Augustus Imperator used the presence of his host and the mutual exhaustion of the warring parties to bring them all to the peace table in Valencia, and in a further demonstration of wisdom beyond his years, did not insist on trying to enforce his mother's partition plan to the letter – something which the Africans certainly would have revolted against, since they still held much land outside of the old Baetic borders. Stressing the importance of unity in the Holy Roman Empire against Muslim encroachment, which threatened not just the Empire's few remaining Syrian & Mesopotamian holdings but also the African heartland, Romanus persuaded the combatants to conclude the War of the Gothic Succession and accept the borders they had been able to secure with the sword. To Bãdalaréu he made an appeal, if not quite to the Stilichians' traditionally redoubtable sense of duty to Rome and willingness to prioritize the good of the Empire over their own interests, then at least to their duty to defend their subjects from death and slavery beneath the Saracen yoke: in this endeavor the young and optimistic Emperor found much-needed support from Prince Érreréyu, who was not of a mind to leave his father-in-law to die in Oea.
Flavius Romanus Augustus Tertius at the start of his reign proper. If his father's chief vice was greed, his was unmistakably gluttony, earning him the unflattering nickname 'The Fat'. That aside, Romanus was a jolly man who had some of Constantine's administrative aptitude and martial determination to go with his diplomatic mind – his better qualities were just (perhaps unfairly) overshadowed by his gut
Thus the Stilichians now found themselves confirmed in possession of most of the Gothic lands south of the Sierra de Guadarrama, from where the allies had been unable to expel their northernmost garrisons – quite a bit more territory than the former borders of Baetica held, indeed this settlement effectively left them in control of most of the great eastern-central province of Carthaginensis (including Cartagena itself, meaning Africa now controlled the hometowns of both the fallen Teodofredo and Bermudo). The Lusitanians were able to secure just about the entirety of the old province of Lusitania, including Emérida and Paca[7]: Viridomaro moved his court from Braga (as Bracara Augusta was now called in both Espanesco and Lusitana) to the former city, which was only fitting since it was the old provincial capital, and strove to terminate the Celtiberian tradition of electing their kings in favor of monopolizing the crown within his family (henceforth referred to as the 'House of Braga' after their old seat), under the guise of finalizing their Romanization and imitating the Blood of Saint Jude. This left Adriano in command of the peninsula's northeast, spanning much but not all of ancient Tarraconensis and chunks of Carthaginensis as well: his Kingdom of Tarraco was now definitively bounded by the Asturian & Cantabrian Mountains to the northwest, the Sierra de Gredos & Sierra de Guadarrama to the southwest, and the River Júcar (Lat.: 'Sucro') to the south. His own descendants will remember him as Adrià I in their divergent northeastern or 'Tarraconensian'[8] (Tar.: Tàrraconensç) tongue, a sort of midpoint between Espanesco and Gallique.
By arranging the Peace of Valencia, Romanus had demonstrated the diplomatic acumen which would be his primary tool throughout his reign, and had achieved a feat which in all probability should have gotten him a better nickname in the history books than 'Romanus the Fat'. He had ended the War of the Gothic Succession and, while unable to expel the Africans from Hispania or even confine them to Baetica, still managed to keep about half of the old Gothic kingdom out of their hands and elevate the other Iberian kingdoms (including one led by an Aloysian cadet branch which, fortunately, had proven more loyal than the House of Valois) to a point where they could contain any further Moorish expansion. In short, while unable to wholly prevent the expansion of Stilichian power, he at least managed to contain it after entering so late in the game and avert the worst-case scenario of Carthage ruling most of Hispania (in fact, their new Spanish domains still fell short of the old Carthage's zone of influence on the peninsula before the Second Punic War). That done however, he immediately had to turn his attention to the east, where the Muslims were surging against both Seraénu in Libya and the fading Ghassanids in Mesopotamia. The Roman army left Valencia's port with the Stilichian host in Hispania following them, not as enemies but as allies & vassals, to collect the Carthaginian legions and with them, rescue the former and rout Husam al-Din in the Battle of Oea before the end of the year. This however was only the beginning of the young Emperor's military career, as larger and more difficult battles lay ahead in Mesopotamia.
Viridomaro proclaims that his new Lusitanian kingdom is here to stay, and has secured a lot more of old Roman Lusitania than the Tarraconensians managed in the east, to his cheering warriors
While Romanus had gotten his proper reign off to a good start in 813, 814 would be a year which demonstrated to the Augustus Imperator his limitations and the considerable room to grow (as a ruler, and not merely physically) which he still had. After leaving the Africans to defend Africa, he sailed for Antioch, and arrived to find the Mideastern situation had continued to slowly deteriorate in the preceding years. Duke Elpidios had failed in his efforts to relieve Dara & Nisibis, first through direct means and then with what was intended to be a diversionary attack into Islamic Syria. The latter had since bogged down and was ultimately reversed at a sharp cost to the Romans in the Banī-ʻUlaym Mountains[9] in large part due to the influx of Arab tribes, certainly including the one which gave that mountain range its new name, as garrisons installed by the late Hussein to lock the region down.
After overcoming what remained of his seasickness, Romanus rode with the Duke to once again try to relieve his Mesopotamian forces, thwarting an early attempt by Burhan al-Din to stop them in the Battle of Taftanaz. With their greatly reinforced numbers, the Romans defeated the Saracens twice more at Serugh[10] and Marida[11], finally reaching Dara near the end of summer. There, however, Caliph Ali & Burhan al-Din had drawn up the full might of the Caliphate, even depleting the siege lines around Nisibis for the decisive battle they had planned. The Muslims cleverly dug ditches and further surrounded them with caltrops not only to trap any Roman cavalrymen who unwisely charged into them, but also to funnel the Roman troops into chokepoints where they could more effectively be contained and defeated. Romanus fared little better than his father had when the latter was fighting real battles for the first time and wound up retreating in defeat after days of fierce but futile fighting.
Queen Arwa of the Ghassanids was not deterred by news of this defeat and resolved to continue holding out in Nisibis, where she still had enough supplies to last another year, but the defenders of Dara were not so steely-spined. Having been unable to sally forth and attack their Arab besiegers from behind while their Emperor was defeated on account of the blocking force left to watch over the city gates under Ala ud-Din, the demoralized garrison surrendered to Ali and Burhan a few days after the battle, leaving Nisibis more isolated than ever before. Romanus was infuriated at this second defeat compounding his first great one, but could not do a whole lot to reverse it immediately: rather than allow the Battle of Dara to get his spirits down, he resolved to look to the future and reorganize his forces for another attempt to relieve Nisibis, or at least to create an opportunity for the Ghassanids to break out of their now almost-certainly-doomed stronghold and fall back to less vulnerable positions along the remaining Roman lines.
Roman forces attempting to bypass the Arabs' traps & field fortifications running smack-dab into Burhan al-Din's prepared blocking forces on unfavorable ground near Dara
The defeat in Upper Mesopotamia was not Romanus' only woe this year. His removal of most of the Treverian legions to first impose a conclusion to the War of the Gothic Succession, and then to fight all the way in the northern Levant, predictably left the northwestern edge of his empire vulnerable to Viking raids – and the Vikings themselves would have been fools to pass up the opportunity, especially as the Britons and Anglo-Saxons were both doing better at countering them recently. Probing attacks struck the Frisian and Belgic[12] coasts early this year, and finding resistance to be largely local and uncoordinated, escalated to larger reaving expeditions over the course of 814. While none of the Norsemen were bold, strong or suicidal enough to attempt to sail against Trévere directly (yet), they did pillage many smaller remote hamlets & monasteries around the northwestern marshes, and also notably sacked the growing port town of Bruges (although they were unable to overcome its Roman castle, where most of the civilian populace found refuge). Upon receiving reports of these crimes, Romanus cursed the Norsemen and swore he'd get even with them, but that would have to wait until after he could extract himself from the East.
In the distant Orient, far away from the struggles of the Romans and Saracens, the rival Chinese dynasties of Later Liang and True Han had spent the past decades putting their lands back together after the outpouring of blood and chaos that had accompanied the fall of the Later Han. Aside from repairing roads, dikes, and fortifications which had been damaged in the great war, clearing out bandits and resettling devastated regions, a mutual agreement had been reached between the northern & southern courts to repair and maintain the Grand Canal built by said Later Han, something which benefited both empires greatly and facilitated trade up and down the Middle Kingdom. Now while both the aging Huanzong and Dezu were determined that, as there was only one Sun in Heaven, there can only be one Son of Heaven below, there was another area in which they could cooperate to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome: an alliance against the Tibetans who still occupied Chengdu and a good chunk of western China with it, the so-called 'Country of Heaven'. Of course, while both dynasties wanted the barbarians out of what they considered an integral Chinese territory, coming to an agreement over how to divide Ba-Shu between themselves was a much thornier task.
In 815 Romanus mounted his second effort to relieve the Siege of Nisibis, having received word from the defenders that they couldn't hold out for much longer on account of their dwindling food supplies (depleted as it was after having to survive three sieges in rapid succession). After regrouping and marshaling reinforcements from both the Caucasian kingdoms (relieved of the Khazar threat) and Africa (both his Carthaginian legions and Moorish auxiliaries captained by Érreréyu), the Roman army set out for Nisibis and was confronted by Burhan al-Din, backed up with the majority of the Islamic army, south of the fallen Dara on a plain which the Greek legionaries of Romanus' host called 'Solachon'. The Roman battle-plan as devised by Duke Elpidios called for the immediate & forceful usage of their cavalry, who were to utilize the flat battlefield to their maximal advantage, so as to put their Saracen counterpart to flight and serve as a spearhead for a general Roman assault. Romanus, still smarting from his defeat at Dara, signed off on this strategy with the expectation that they'd sweep the Arabs from the field before Burhan would have any time to engineer any clever defenses.
Burhan's own plan called for a classic feigned retreat by his light cavalry, which would draw the Romans into a trap whereupon the majority of his army would descend on their flanks. However, the numbers and ferocity behind the Roman assault turned his men's feigned retreat into a real one, and as the larger Roman army fanned out it threatened to roll up his flanking divisions as well. Lead elements of the Roman chivalry surged as far as the Arab camp and Elpidios' gambit had nearly paid off when Caliph Ali surprised his own generalissimo and waded into the fray with his elite Qaraghilman – the imperial household guard of the Hashemite Caliphs, whose very name (a mixture of Turkic and Arabic) indicated their overwhelmingly Turkic background in service to the obviously Arab descendants of Muhammad – backing him up. This display of courage from their hitherto-unassuming ruler and the presence of the Hashemite green standard inspired the wavering Muslim troops to return to the fight with all that they had, and soon they had reversed the tide and seemed to be on the verge of driving the Romans from Solachon in a rout.
Caliph Ali ibn Hussein, in whom the warlike spirit of Muhammad and his immediate successors had reawakened after being absent from the last few Hashemite generations, preparing to lead his household guard into the fray and stabilize his wavering lines at Solachon
But it was at this time that Romanus himself stepped up, not merely committing the Roman reserve but also furiously meeting Ali and the Qaraghilman in combat with his own paladins and exhorting his faltering legions to keep fighting beneath the blue-and-white Aloysian banner which proclaimed Christ's victory. Both young monarchs (comparatively – Ali had a decade over Romanus) evidently did not lack for bravery, and were noted to respectively get their scimitar and mace dirty as the Battle of Solachon degenerated into a frantic, blood-soaked melee. Ultimately the Caliph was wounded by an intrepid knight's lance and had to fall back to recuperate, but his soldiers obeyed his command not to follow him at any cost and the two armies wound up mutually breaking off combat to withdraw to their camps sometime after sunset. After taking account of their rather heavy losses, the two monarchs agreed overnight to negotiate a short truce and decide the fate of Nisibis around a table rather than try to kill each other the next morning.
Since the Muslims had bled slightly less than the Christians and had yet to abandon the field, it soon became apparent to Romanus that there would be no way to get them to move out of his path without a second day of battle, which clearly was not without its risks and would be costly even in victory. If he lost, it was curtains for Nisibis; and even if he didn't, there was a chance that Ala ud-Din would be able to take the stronghold city with the Arabs' reserve army (with which he was conducting the siege in Burhan's absence), which Ali managed to bluff him into thinking was about to receive reinforcements from Persia. However, neither would Romanus forsake the Ghassanids so easily, and he still had strength enough to make a rematch as dangerous a proposition for the Caliphate as it was for him.
Ultimately Romanus agreed to give up Nisibis for the time being, but Ali agreed to let Arwa and the Ghassanid court & defenders leave for the Roman lines with their arms, armor, horses and honor intact; furthermore he would not sack the city when he took possession of it and would even treat those members of the garrison left behind due to severe illness or injury at his own expense. The Romans and Arabs further agreed to six months' truce to rest & rebuild their armies before inevitably resuming hostilities sometime in the later half of 816. Despite being enemy monarchs and a comically mismatched pair – the stick-thin, thickly bearded and stern Ali making for a razor-sharp contrast to obese, beardless and perpetually smiling Romanus – the duo also began to cultivate one of history's stranger friendships in the inconclusive aftermath of the Battle of Solachon, founded on a newly-gained mutual respect for each other's courage in the fighting (even if it would never be enough to keep them from going to war with each other from time to time).
Arwa bint Sirhan, in whom the Christian Arabs had found their last echo of ancient Arab warrior-queens like the fourth-century Mavia, leading the defeated but unbroken Ghassanids to the safety of the Roman lines and Edessa, their last great bastion
North of the Roman world and its struggles, the Vikings met one of their earliest reversals in Ireland when Jarl Røgnvaldr, fighting as part of the Dál Riatan army under his nominal sovereign & employer Óengus III, was defeated by the warriors of Ulaid in the Battle of Ráth Mór[13]. As a consequence, the Dál nAraidi vassals of the Dál Riatan over-kingdom who governed this region switched their allegiance to Óengus' victorious Dál Fiatach rivals, thereby costing the island kingdom its foothold on the larger Emerald Isle. Óengus was not as upset over the loss as he would normally have been however, since it proved to him that the dreaded pagan Norse who had so far dared to boss him around in his own keep could be beaten in battle and motivated him to begin plotting a coup to remove their hold over him. Røgnvaldr did himself and his people no favors, as he insisted on increasing the tribute paid by the Dál Riatans even though he & his Vikings had just lost a major battle. In a sign of his growing defiance, Óengus aided and abetted the Culdee monks of Iona in transferring their saints' relics to Ireland (eventually ending up in the safekeeping of the Kings of Munster and their formidable Rock of Cashel, a fortress far outside the Vikings' reach) for fear that the Norse might make good on their threats to desecrate said relics if the monastery couldn't meet the heightened demand for tribute.
Meanwhile, the Later Liang and True Han continued their negotiations for an alliance against the Tibetans throughout 815. Possession of Chengdu remained a sore point between the two dynasties, and it took until the year was almost half-done for Dezu to concede that it should go to the Liang along with northern Ba-Shu, while the south and the Nanzhong territories were rightfully his. However, the Southern Emperor intended to race the Liang forces for the great western city anyway, and if his men happened to take it before Huanzong's did – well, he certainly wasn't going to just hand it over, regardless of what he was saying through diplomatic channels now. After all, even the paragon Liu Bei was not above subterfuge, as his failed plot to assassinate Cao Cao while working for the latter and subsequent defection to Yuan Shao only to then abandon the latter after the Battle of Guandu attested; why now should Liu Dan pass up a great opportunity to strengthen himself at his primary opponent's expense?
In any case the Emperor of True Han would not actively lead his scheme, instead leaving that duty to his now-grown eldest son Liu Xuan, Prince of Han, with the elderly but still formidable Prince of Chu providing guidance while he was busy building a clock tower in Hangzhou. Huanzong, being the greater soldier between the two Emperors, would still lead his own army against the Tibetans despite also getting on in years. The Tibetan Emperor Tritsuk Löntsen, whose own hair was starting to turn gray by 815, tried and failed to persuade either Chinese dynasty to attack the other with his support instead of pressing on against Chengdu, and thus prepared to defend his own empire's easternmost possessions against a total of 650,000 Chinese soldiers pressing in on it from all sides. He summoned reinforcements from every corner of his dominion and all of his vassals to help him with this task, including the Indo-Romans in the distant west, but even at his full strength he had at his disposal fewer than half of the juggernaut hosts which the Chinese were throwing at him, and despite triumphing against both the Liang & True Han's first few probing attacks at the war's outset they would not stop coming at him with their overwhelming numbers: Tibetan sages likened this war to fighting a mountain from their homeland.
A Later Liang cataphract contending with a mercenary Uyghur horse-archer and an Indo-Roman heavy horseman from Tocharia on the plains of Ba-Shu
====================================================================================
[1] Teruel.
[2] Augusta Bilbilis – Calatayud.
[3] Arriaca – Guadalajara, Castilla-La Mancha.
[4] Complutum – Alcalá de Henares.
[5] Iscina – Madina Sultan, east of Sirte.
[6] Macomades Euphranta – Sirte.
[7] Pax Augusta – Beja, Portugal.
[8] Equivalent to Old Catalan.
[9] Jabal Zawiya.
[10] Suruç.
[11] Mardin.
[12] Referring to not quite modern Belgium, but a larger area including it as well as the southernmost parts of the Netherlands & far northern France.
[13] Now part of Antrim.
Franco,i mean Baladaur,lost battle at Ebro! horrible,reds would win !
Jokes aside - many things changed,so arabs could get 2 fortress.
But,Tibet is fucked,and indo-romans probably,too.
Well,i hope that after the war moors finally would find Carribeans !
No Aztecs,no quick conqest this time.
Jokes aside - many things changed,so arabs could get 2 fortress.
But,Tibet is fucked,and indo-romans probably,too.
Well,i hope that after the war moors finally would find Carribeans !
No Aztecs,no quick conqest this time.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
I reckon that with Caliphate focused West and slowly creeping forth, war after war, Indo-Romans will be a lesser target, keeping them alive for a bit longer.
Author (couldn't you pick a nickname that doesn't abbreviate into CoW?) did mention in one of the previous updates that with Azores, there will be no new discoveries for Roman seafarers for quite some time.
Must say that for how troubled the start of his reign was, Romanus did really well, but there are many more UXOs for him to defuse.
Author (couldn't you pick a nickname that doesn't abbreviate into CoW?) did mention in one of the previous updates that with Azores, there will be no new discoveries for Roman seafarers for quite some time.
Must say that for how troubled the start of his reign was, Romanus did really well, but there are many more UXOs for him to defuse.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Yep, the Azores (now owned by Lusitania since the Gothic captain who discovered them defected after the Balthing implosion) is where discoveries by the Roman sphere is stopping for a while. Not to say that means a total stop to European discoveries & expansion in the New World for the rest of the TL, just that it'll be driven by the people already there for the most part (of whom the Irish are the most likely to be friendly to any Romans) rather than the Romans themselves or their subjects back home doing it for some time. While I do obviously intend for earlier European advances into the Western Hemisphere and an earlier 'Columbian Exchange' to go with it, the Europeans won't be bringing potatoes and tomatoes and such back to the Old World this early, haha.
Anything & everything else, as usual, is spoiler material. But subjects like the Indo-Romans' situation and the state of their truce with Islam are definitely going to be addressed before too long.
Regarding my nickname, no worries, it's just an in-joke I came up with some friends ages ago in high school. The ridiculous abbreviation was intentional, lol. But as for what to call me, just Willis will do
Anything & everything else, as usual, is spoiler material. But subjects like the Indo-Romans' situation and the state of their truce with Islam are definitely going to be addressed before too long.
Regarding my nickname, no worries, it's just an in-joke I came up with some friends ages ago in high school. The ridiculous abbreviation was intentional, lol. But as for what to call me, just Willis will do
816-820: Setting the Stage
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
The truce between Rome and the Caliphate held throughout the first six months of 816, as both empires needed time to rest their forces and bring more reinforcements into the fray. For the Romans, Romanus III took this time to mend fences and negotiate an end to disputes between the Serbs, Thracians and Croats as his mother had previously done for the Dulebians and Dacians. While he would be recorded in the history books remarking that this feat was "the most frustrating challenge of my reign", the Augustus Imperator still managed it in time to free up a number of the Danubian legions and these additional Slavic auxiliaries to cross the Bosphorus and join his main army in Mesopotamia, shortly after more Africans had been sent at the request of Érreréyu as well. He also had light artillery pieces assembled in Antioch for use in the field. The Muslims, meanwhile, had not only just finished training a new batch of ghilman slave-soldiers (originally bought mostly from the Khazars during Hussein's time) but also expanded their recruitment of free, non-Arab mawla ('helper') soldiers, chiefly from Persia – a practice which had really taken off under the long reign of Hashim, who did the most to integrate what remained of the Persian aristocracy and Persians in general into the new Islamic order.
Their armies reinforced, both empires mutually agreed to terminate the truce and get right back to fighting in the late summer of this year. The Muslims captured Marida almost immediately to the northwest of fallen Dara & Nisibis in their opening attack, after which Ali & Burhan launched a feint toward Amida to the north to try to pull the Romans' attention away from their true objective – Edessa. However Romanus, Arwa and their generals saw through this scheme and trusted that Amida's existing garrison could repel whatever Islamic attack came their way from behind that stronghold city's mighty defenses, instead concentrating on the defense of the Ghassanid capital to the best of their ability. The stage was now set for one of the largest battles between Christian and Muslim armies in the ninth century, with both sides being roughly equally matched at nearly 30,000 strong.
The Saracen cavalry initiated hostilities by engaging in skirmishes and attempting a feigned retreat to draw the Romans out in pursuit, but Romanus didn't bite – not only had he learned from his previous battles with the Hashemites, but he was the defending side and saw no need to risk his secure position by chasing after the Muslims, especially when his own array of missile troops (chiefly the Ghassanid and Moorish auxiliaries) could already match the Islamic light cavalry blow-for-blow anyway. After this early skirmishing had proved inconclusive, Ali commanded his generals to engage the Christians more aggressively, backed by a favorable westward wind which had begun to blow in the legions' faces. The Romans fought back not only with the usual arrows and javelins but also with scorpion bolts, which were heavy enough to fly unbothered by the wind blowing against them and impale two or three Muslims at a time.
Holy Roman imperial scorpions and their crewmen, which would prove important to Romanus' strategy at the Battle of Edessa
At the climax of this engagement, a great wedge formed by 1,000 of the most heavily equipped elite soldiers in Ali's army – a mix of veteran and newly recruited ghilman, the latter being most eager to prove themselves while the former would provide them with guidance – managed to pierce through the central legions of Romanus' own battle line and surged straight toward his position. Rather than flee, the Emperor ordered his paladins to dismount and fight to the death with him around the Aloysian imperial standard and a great jewelled cross provided to him by Pope Sergius: he himself didn't stay on his own horse for long either, leaping from it and crushing an unfortunate ghulam to death beneath his great weight (to which his ornate armor was further added) very early in the fight. This display of valor inspired the Romans to stay in the field, and the arrival of troops from Duke Elpidios' reserve to plug the gap & cut off the Hashemite spearhead sealed their victory. Burhan al-Din had the retreat sounded near sunset, concluding the Battle of Edessa in a Christian victory and denying the Muslims their objective of completely destroying the Ghassanid realm before the year's end.
In the east, while the Liang were still held up at the great mountain passes protecting Ba-Shu's northern flank, the True Han decided to change gears in the south and eliminate the Tibetans' southern auxiliary in Nanzhong rather than continue trying to push up the Yangtze directly. The tribes of the southwest were fierce fighters well-accustomed to the high mountains and great jungles of their homeland, but once Liu Xuan and Liu Qin got going, their options were limited against the True Han armies which outnumbered theirs by 10:1. Meng Yuanlao's successor Meng Cheng fought courageously, slowing the advance of the behemoth Chinese columns with furious ambushes from the trees & hills and also engaging True Han divisions in open battle from time to time with Tibetan support. While the Nanzhong warriors were notably underequipped compared to their adversaries, as all but their most elite fighters wore rattan armor & carried shields made of the same bamboo-like material rather than iron, they used their home-ground advantage to great effect in slowing the Chinese advance, and further fielded beasts of war ranging from elephants to Meng's own menagerie of trained pet tigers.
Unfortunately for the Nanzhong, none of this proved sufficient to stop the deluge of Chinese soldiers pouring into their country, and despite the enormous frustrations they had encountered along the way, Liu Xuan and Liu Qin did manage to burn and fight their way to the barbarians' capital of Kunzhou[1]. Meng Cheng had evacuated his court & people to the more remote town of Dali[2] to the northwest ahead of the grinding Chinese onslaught and burned it down to deny the invaders food & shelter, but none of his tricks had proved sufficient to do much more than delay the inevitable. The Tibetans also needed to divert the contingents they had deployed to support him against the True Han (for all the good that was doing) back up north to defend the passes of Ba-Shu against Huanzong's increasingly sophisticated attacks, in which the Liang were employing siege engines that the Tibetans couldn't build themselves including mobile bridges, moat-filling covered wagons and siege towers: the northernmost Baishui Pass had already fallen to one of these better-planned and supported assaults. Another attempt by the Lhasa court to negotiate an end to hostilities failed around this time, as neither empire would be satisfied with anything less than the expulsion of the Tibetan presence in Ba-Shu.
Eighth-century Nanzhong warriors, most of whom can be seen sporting the rattan armor iconic to their people (save for the horseman wearing an iron helmet and lamellar vest). While the climbing palm was plentiful in their homeland and this armor was cheap & easy to manufacture, it was less protective than the iron armor of their much more numerous Chinese enemies, and also highly flammable
The coming of 817 also heralded the final large-scale engagements between the Roman and Hashemite empires. From Edessa Romanus and his legions surged forth to try to recapture Dara & Nisibis, thereby restoring the territorial status quo ante, but this was an outcome which the Muslims naturally strove to avert at all costs – it would not do, for either Ali or Burhan, to have their already incremental conquests (which did not measure up to Hussein's original goal at the start of all this in the first place, Antioch, now entirely out of their reach) reversed. The Romans got as far as Marida, which they temporarily recaptured, but were soon after defeated in a battle east of the city: there Ali & Burhan fielded a large camel corps to overcome the Roman cavalrymen, as well as a unit of war elephants brought all the way from India courtesy of the former's Alid cousins, though the latter proved less useful than the camelry thanks to the Romans' carroballistae.
The Saracens took Marida again after this victory and pursued the retreating Christians to Harran a ways south of Edessa, where they would fight the last battle of this particular round of Roman-Arab hostilities. Romanus sent envoys to the Hashemite camp the day before the battle began, declaring that both sides had surely bled enough and that it was time for them to negotiate a peace settlement, which Ali was originally inclined to accept until he was talked into fighting by Burhan, who suggested this message clearly meant that the Romans must be on their last legs. The Arabs had the better of the initial missile exchange, but when they closed in for combat they found that Romanus had copied the manner in which Burhan defeated him the first time they fought: the Roman lines around Harran were protected by trenches filled with wooden stakes and iron caltrops. Burhan himself lamented that Romanus had been a better student of his than even Ala ud-Din.
The Arab attack floundered, as even when they tried to attack between the trenches, they only found themselves funneled right into more caltrops and the waiting spears & shields of the heavily armored legionaries. When the Saracen advances had completely stalled, Romanus led a counterattack spearheaded by his heavy cavalry, which swept most of the Saracen army away – Burhan included, as the old Islamic generalissimo's horse threw him into one of the Roman trenches at this critical juncture. Ali personally intervened once more to rally his fleeing men and prevent a rout, but he was unable to completely reverse the tide of battle and only managed to impose order upon the Islamic retreat, thereby averting a total disaster. Suffice to say, he was certainly completely amenable to Romanus' appeal for peace now, what with the war-hawks at his court having not only been discredited but decapitated by the Battle of Harran. A few more weeks of inconclusive skirmishing followed (the Romans didn't have the strength to keep pushing forward either after the last few great battles they had fought, victory and loss alike) before a ceasefire was declared, hopefully one more lasting than the last, and the two emperors sat down for peace talks.
Greek cataphracts surging forth to sweep away the exhausted Saracen heavy cavalry at the climax of the Battle of Harran
In the distant east, the True Han continued to press their advance against the Nanzhong, who in turn were gradually falling back toward Dali in the west. Bereft of even the slightest hope of turning back the Chinese tide since his Tibetan allies diverted all their men northward to defend Ba-Shu, Meng Cheng grudgingly sued for terms before the Princes of Han & Chu could reach Dali itself, understanding that it was extremely unlikely that they'd be in a merciful mood if they got that close to achieving a total victory over him. As it turned out, the Liu princes were happy to avoid any further needling in the form of Nanzhong ambushes on their behemoth army, but they still very much had the upper hand and intended to use it: in his first act as a diplomat, Liu Xuan negotiated the submission of Nanzhong to his father and the True Han's annexation of those territories which they had managed to occupy before the ceasefire went into place, terms which were eminently acceptable to Dezu as well. The truncated Nanzhong state, now a vassal of the True Han, would be renamed the 'Kingdom of Dali' after its new and decidedly not-so-temporary capital, since Kunzhou remained under Chinese occupation.
Liu Xuan remained to solidify the True Han hold on their new southwestern province, which the records increasingly referred to as 'Yunnan' from this point onward, and so Liu Qin was sent northward alone to recover Ba-Shu from the Tibetans & hopefully also beat the Later Liang to Chengdu. In that regard he had some luck, as the Tibetan reinforcements pulled out of Yunnan earlier had been put to good use in Ba-Shu's northern mountain passes where they helped in continuing to hold back the massive and overpowering Liang hosts. Furthermore, Dali was required to contribute some of its warriors to an auxiliary detachment in the elder Liu's army as an early show of its new allegiance, resulting in there being a few thousand Dali warriors marching with their former Chinese enemies against their equally-former Tibetan allies toward the end of this year. The True Han were able to capture Yuzhou[3] and then Jiangyang[4] in southern Ba-Shu, which would serve them well as bases from which to press on northward to Chengdu.
Meanwhile on the other side of the planet, it was in 817 that the elders of Dakaruniku selected the man who will go down history as the first true king among the Wildermen: a physically strong and highly ambitious young warlord who fittingly carried the name 'Kádaráš-rahbád' – Dakarunikuan for 'Bloody Axe'[5] – selected on the basis that their shaman saw he would lead them to greater & more terrible heights than ever before in a datura[6]-induced vision and also because he had contracted the strange fevers brought by the Britons, and lived. To Kádaráš-rahbád, the ancient Míssissépené custom of leading by consensus and having the wisest, oldest men elect their chiefs were but obstacles to overcome: all who followed him into the battlefield had to obey his orders unconditionally, and while he allowed those closest to him (functionally his officers) to question and advise him on occasion, he ultimately always had the last word in what his warband did – disobedience was to be swiftly punished with an ax-blow to the skull, no more, no less. So too should it be in his new chiefdom, he thought. On a similar note, he had fathered and would continue to sire many strong children with numerous women, and saw no reason as to why he should let any council pass over them when they were natural successors to his legacy.
Young Kádaráš-rahbád shortly after becoming chief of Dakaruniku, wielding the iron ax for which he was known and flanked by one of his concubines and a lieutenant from his warband. In hindsight, drug-induced visions/hallucinations were probably not the greatest way to choose the leader of one's growing civilization, especially if this leader's name was literally 'Bloody Axe'
In the Levant, the first months of 818 were spent by the Holy Roman Empire and its Caliphal rival on hashing out terms for a peace treaty that would, hopefully, last longer than the Peace of Samosata. The Romans had to further concede Dara and Nisibis, which they could not recover, to the Muslims: Ghassanid Mesopotamia thus had been further truncated to Edessa, Amida and the lands in-between, making for a very small buffer between Greek Anatolia and the Hashemites indeed, though Romanus' final victories had at least bought this last Christian Arab realm a few more decades or even another century. In exchange the Muslims had to dismantle the northern Syrian fortifications they'd been throwing up to serve as well-defended forward bases against Antioch, to re-affirm the right of the Augustus Imperator to appoint Ionian Patriarchs in the three Sees under their power (as well as to generally restore public toleration of the Ionian community within their borders), and to pay a one-off lump sum to refill the Roman treasury as an indemnity for starting the war in the first place. The Romans may have still lost more ground, but considering the circumstances at the difficult start of Romanus' reign, things certainly could've turned out much worse for them.
Though Romanus and Ali's good interpersonal relations may not keep them at peace indefinitely, it would serve to give this new 'Peace of Marida' a more solid foundation (by way of both emperors being less personally inclined to attack their new friend than their fathers had ever been) than the Peace of Samosata. With this compromise in place, Romanus made his way back home, mediating in various old disputes between the South Slavs and new ones among the Italians as he went. A growing thorn in the Mediterranean underbelly of the Aloysians' dominion was the growing tension between the merchant princes of Italy – spearheaded by the increasingly wealthy and powerful Venetians – and their South Slavic neighbors to the east, on account of their trade in slaves of a mostly Slavic origin. Now industrial-scale slavery as practiced by the Roman Empire at its height was still well entrenched in the south of the Roman world, despite damage done to the system by the barbarian invasions and periodically by the Stilichians, as numerous slaves toiled on the latifundiae of the aristocracy (far from all of them having sided against Stilicho's heirs, after all, and now including even some descendants of Stilichian beneficiaries who moved up to fill the vacuum left by those older houses toppled for betting against them) alongside the serfs who weren't much better off, and also as was traditional not a few more educated slaves were retained in the households of their masters.
Imperial law forbade selling Christian slaves to non-Christians and forcefully taking imperial subjects as slaves, so to feed demand the Italians had cultivated trading ties with the Khazars (and through them, the Norsemen of Ladoga even further to the north) in order to buy pagan slaves for trade to the Muslims and other Christian kingdoms around the Mediterranean under the Aloysian aegis, a trade which they even dared engage in under the table when Rome warred with either or both of these rival powers. However, while this was the official line (and probably actually true in the majority of cases), there can be little doubt that Italian slave traders certainly bought Christian slaves taken from Ruthenia, Poland or lands under Roman rule (such as Dacia) in Khazar attacks while consciously avoiding asking any questions. And while the Croats and Carantanians might not be feeling any particularly great sentiment of pan-Slavic solidarity toward Ruthenians and Poles (or each other for that matter), they also accused the Venetians of having targeted their border settlements for plundering & slave-taking in the upheaval of Romanus' regency, while his mother had been too busy juggling much greater threats to worry much about Italian corsairs targeting South Slavic villages.
Part of a villa mosaic from Campania depicting a ruddy-haired Slavic slave tilling the soil of his owner's latifundium. Well, what were the chances that both this issue and the Zanj one in the Islamic world might come to the forefront around the same timeframe down the line?
Romanus found himself faced with a conundrum, since while he was hardly the biggest fan of the concept of slavery and did not want to needlessly anger the same Slavic subjects he had just spent an inordinate amount of time keeping at peace, the Italians had proven to be highly important to battling the growing threat of the Saracen at sea and would doubtless retain that role for many centuries to come, so he certainly did not wish to antagonize them either. Furthermore, Gaul & especially Germania might be the Aloysians' biggest recruiting grounds and where their most faithful subjects lived, but Italy constituted their single largest and most profitable tax base (even if Constantinople was grander than Rome itself or Ravenna, Italy as a whole paid more into the imperial coffers than Greece did, in part because the officials of the Praetorian Prefecture of the Orient had always enjoyed less central scrutiny since the days of Aloysius I & Helena and thus had more room to skim off taxes than their Italic counterparts) – and certainly the trade dues levied upon Italian commerce were a big part of that.
Thus, while the Papacy had forbidden slave trafficking in Rome itself and Pope Sergius even renewed the tradition of buying the freedom of slaves trafficked there by his fellow Italians[7], Romanus levied some punishments on the Italians – fining his Galbaio in-laws and others for raiding his South Slavic subjects, issuing compensation from said fines to those neighboring principalities, and mandating the immediate freeing of any Christians found among their slave pens – but he promised only to better enforce the existing laws on the books, not to tighten a noose around Mediterranean slavery on the Christian side of the sea. The job of finding a more permanent resolution to the growing Italo-Slavic tensions, as well as the theological contradictions between Christianity and the Roman institution of slavery – the assimilation of the British clergy, who though Ionian now had doubtless inherited Pelagian ideas around freedom and its primacy in God's eyes from their forefathers, having turned out to be a major boon to the anti-slavery faction among the Roman Patriarchate – was one he'd leave to his descendants, just as his predecessors had left more than a few troubles in his lap.
While a great war had come to a close in the Occident, a new one was beginning to spin up in the Orient. From his newly secured bases in southern Ba-Shu, Liu Qin attacked northward to Chengdu this year, driving the hopelessly outnumbered Tibetans back into the city. Elements among the Chinese citizenry, who had little to like in the extortionate rule of the barbarians since the Tibetans had shown themselves to be arbitrary and oft-extortionate masters over the past decades, hatched a plot to sabotage the city gates for the besiegers' benefit: and to signal which gate to attack to the Prince of Chu, their leaders – three sages affiliated with the Southern Celestial Master sect of Taoism which Dezu was a patron of – set off a cluster of alchemical mixtures wrapped in rolls of paper which they would throw from the walls. The first firecrackers in recorded history did their job, and Liu Qin was able to successfully storm the city and put its Tibetan defenders to the sword before the end of 818. However, by this time the Liang had themselves broken through the Jianmen and Xiameng Passes, and captured both the profitable salt wells of Langzhong and Zitong with its great Jin-era Qiqushan Temple. Huanzong was decidedly less than amused upon being informed that the True Han had beaten him to Chengdu and now weren't going to hand it over, despite their preexisting agreement, which he was now going to tear up for having just demonstrated its worthlessness.
Chinese saboteurs working for the True Han launching a firecracker into the sky to identify which of Chengdu's gates their countrymen should be attacking
By 819, Romanus had definitively returned to Trévere and once more held court from atop the throne second only to God's in the Aula Palatina. Aside from ensuring that Hispania did not descend into war between the Africans and their northern adversaries again, he was finally able to turn his attention to the growing Viking scourge on his northern coast. A singular legion was dispatched to Britannia under one of his uncle Haistulf's lieutenants at the request of both the Pendragons and Raedwaldings, and at this stage they proved sufficient to support the Britannic kingdoms in lining the beaches of Rome's northernmost federates with the heads of reavers on stakes and rapidly deter further raids – for a time. The Emperor also demanded redress for the earlier attacks on the Belgic coast from the King of Denmark, Horik Sigfriedson (great-grandson of Holger I, the king who interacted with Romanus' own great-great-grandfather Aloysius II), but was refused on the grounds that Scylding royal clan had nothing to do with the attack, even if some of the reavers involved may have been Danish. While this may have been true, it was unverifiable and unsatisfactory to the Augustus Imperator, who now set his mind to launching a punitive expedition against the Danes.
Over the new border with the Hashemites, Caliph Ali was engaged in some house-cleaning. The death of Burhan al-Din in the Battle of Edessa, while depriving the armies of Islam of their most accomplished and most senior general, had been something of a hidden boon to the latest Heir of the Prophet, much like Nusrat al-Din's death in battle had been to his great-grandfather Hashim a century prior. Ali compelled most of Burhan's appointees to retire in comfort and replaced them with a younger generation of ghilman – including many newly-minted veterans of the latest Roman-Arab war – whose loyalties and interests were more strongly aligned with himself than their predecessors, and appointed a civil leader with no significant military ties as his Grand Vizier in the form of the mawla Abbas al-Babili, a Babylonian Jewish convert to Islam. To cap off his consolidation of power, he awarded the senior Egyptian general Husam al-Din with the right to finally marry & have his own family as well as a luxurious estate in the Nile Delta to raise said family on in retirement, so as to get him out of the way of the younger Ala ud-Din's appointment to leadership of the Islamic forces.
Ali ibn Hassan idolized his ancestor Hashim, considered the second best example of a strong Hashemite Caliph after only Qasim ibn Muhammad himself, and tried to imitate his successes, down to maintaining correspondence with a Holy Roman Emperor who he personally considered a friend despite waging the occasional war with the Rūmī
In China, the armies of Later Liang and True Han once more came to blows, though for the time being their energies were entirely confined to Ba-Shu and especially toward the control of Chengdu. The northern approach to that city was covered by the Mianzhu Pass, already garrisoned by the Han, so Huanzong campaigned in eastern and southern Ba-Shu instead with the objective of bypassing the Han's prepared defenses and also isolating the tarnished but still great city from the rest of the Southern Dynasty's territories. Liu Qin saw through his gambit and countered accordingly, engaging the Liang forces in a number of bloody but generally inconclusive engagements across the eastern Chengdu Plain throughout 819. Of these the largest and fiercest was also the last, fought near Linjiang[8], turned to be a more conclusive Liang victory, allowing Huanzong to finally begin cutting his arch-rival off from the True Han court along the upper length of the Yangtze. The Prince of Chu understood the danger he was now in, and called upon Liu Xuan to march from Dali to aid him.
Beyond the seas east of the sundered Middle Kingdom, the Yamato were busily cultivating their increasingly distinct culture's traditions – kokufū bunka, the 'national culture' – for the benefit of future generations in peace. To start with, the instability in China and a corresponding further slowing of Chinese exports to Japan (already massively hampered after the Yamato broke free of Chinese suzerainty in the twilight years of the Later Han) opened up an opportunity for the imperial court newly settled at Heian-kyō to develop their own writing system: no longer would the Japanese express their thoughts in writing with Chinese characters, but rather they used their own from this point onward, called hiragana. Tea plantations were also established near Heian-kyō, taking advantage of the plant's seeds being transported to Japan by traveling Buddhist monks, and with them were planted the seeds of the intricate Japanese tea ceremony. The court of Go-Saimei also undertook efforts to distance their fashion styles from those of the Liang and Han courts, popularizing more colorful & elaborate styles of kimono (which, when worn in layers, now constituted the formal fashion of the Yamato imperial court: sokutai for men and jūnihitoe for women) in addition to face-painting with rice powder (oshiroi) and applying a red lip paint made from safflowers (beni), eyebrow-plucking (hikimayu), and the blackening of teeth using a sort of iron-gall ink (hagurome, later renamed ohaguro) as the new beauty standards of their people[9].
Emperor Go-Saimei, his empress-consort ('Kōgō') Chūshi and their eldest son Crown Prince Korehito (future Emperor Montoku), demonstrating the Japanese aesthetic trends developed in the early ninth century
Half a world away from the Japanese and their peaceful cultivation of culture, Kádaráš-rahbád was rapidly escalating from mere raiding to lead the Dakarunikuans in a conquering spree against their neighbors: rather than allow any rival elite to persist and potentially organize schemes for revenge, he developed his habit of wiping out the chiefly families except for a single woman of childbearing age, who he would then marry to one of his lieutenants. Said lieutenant would be installed in the defeated tribe's town, not quite as a new chief but as functionally a satrap of Dakaruniku's, and be supported by a garrison of loyal warriors who had also taken wives from the ranks of the subjugated (the ones who hadn't already been killed in the earlier fighting or enslaved and packed off to Dakaruniku proper, anyway). Of those men and women who chose slavery rather than death after being overcome by Dakaruniku's copper-and-iron-wielding warriors, Kádaráš-rahbád did not send them all to Dakaruniku, nor did he sacrifice all those who he took for himself to his gods: rather, he strove to monopolize control of the copper & iron mines he found, and settled these enslaved rival Wildermen to work those mines in a bid to develop a metalworking industry under his exclusive control, which would be key to his future plans. In this manner the ambitious warlord built a power-base loyal to himself, not to Dakaruniku – an important step toward his grand vision for a mighty empire which all those around him would bow to in terror.
The Romans set about preparing their punitive expedition against Denmark throughout 820. Not only did cavalry squadrons detached from the Treverian legions aggressively patrol the Belgic coast with the intent of massacring those Vikings still so over-bold as to raid lands close to the Aloysian capital even after the Emperor had returned, but Romanus also launched a recruiting drive in these regions to refill the ranks of said legions, pitching his appeal to the locals on the grounds that surely they must want revenge against the Norsemen who have increasingly plagued their shores; attacked their towns and places of worship; and carried off their daughters in recent years. He rebuilt Bruges to not only serve as a nexus of North Sea trade again, but also as a military port and the base for a permanent imperial naval squadron to combat the Vikings at sea, hopefully before they land and start pillaging on the continent. The Saxons, Thuringians and Lutici also began to engage in raids & skirmishes of their own on the Danish border, not just in retaliation for any Viking raid to strike their lands by sea or river (regardless of whether the perpetrators were actually Danes) but also to soften up Danish defenses ahead of their overlord's larger planned attack. Amid this excitement, Romanus did not forget to finally father an heir with his Empress Joana, who was born this year and baptized Aloysius.
Treverian legionaries and local Belgic militiamen attacking a Viking raiding party as the latter try to flee with their ill-gotten goods & thralls
Meanwhile, the Later Liang spent much of 820 maneuvering to finish surrounding & besieging Liu Qin in Chengdu, taking Yuzhou and Jiangyang as their opening move before locking down the rest of the southern Ba-Shu plain and decisively forcing the Prince of Chu behind the western bastion's walls in the Battle of Guanghan. Meanwhile, Liu Xuan had been busy requesting reinforcements from his father and securing the allegiance of the non-Chinese tribal chiefs in the parts of Yunnan which he had just conquered: with Dezu's authorization he handed down mild terms for their submission, requiring the chieftains to kowtow before the Emperor in order to receive his sanction as the rightful ruler of their tribe, pay an annual tribute, and not deviate from the foreign policy of the True Han – which certainly extended to supplying the dynasty with native auxiliaries in wartime, such as right now. Thus the Prince of Han was able to assemble a new 100,000-man army in and around Yunnan this year, a fifth of whom were a collection of Miao, Lolo, Bai, etc. auxiliaries who in all likelihood had fought against them as part of the Nanzhong army not too long before.
With this host, Liu Xuan set out to save his kinsman. Rather than take the expected approach from the south and fight his way through Liang-held Yuzhou & Jiangyang, the Han crown prince moved in from the southwest, crossing through the western mountain passes with the guidance of his native scouts and emerging to threaten the Liang army's rear from Mount Emei. Huanzong was caught off-guard and lifted the siege to avoid getting caught in-between the emerging True Han pincer, allowing the Lius to meet and merge their forces on the Chengdu plain. Together they forced the Liang hosts back out into eastern & northern Ba-Shu, in the process overcoming the Liang rearguard in the Third Battle of Guanghan. However, Huanzong was not far from defeated and planned to continue trying to conquer Chengdu (as well as the rest of Ba-Shu), on top of seeking a fated third and final duel with Liu Qin.
Now the two men might be in their sixties, but they were both still fit and fierce fighters for their age, and though his red hair may have turned entirely silver the Northern Emperor saw no reason as to why he should not try to make good on his threat to his rival that the next time they fought in person would be the last – whichever of them died, at least they would go out in a more memorable fashion than simply dying of old age in bed. Meanwhile, the Tibetans had retreated to the eastern mountains of the Kham region, where they recruited heavily from the local Khampa and Baima populations and waited for a chance to jump on whoever won the ongoing battle for Ba-Shu. Luckily for Tritsuk Löntsen (who, though greatly aged, was still a little younger than either Liu Qin or Huanzong) and his westernmost vassal, the Muslims were still too weary from fighting two wars in a row (or arguably, one long war with a short truce in-between) with the Holy Roman Empire to launch a campaign against the Indo-Romans right now, though the Alid princes continued to apply pressure against them in the form of ghazw raids in the interim.
Emperor Huanzong of Later Liang in his twilight years, plotting out what he hopes to be a final glorious confrontation with his worthy opponent Liu Qin over the late winter of 820
In the far west, Kádaráš-rahbád continued to assemble the building blocks of empire. Word of his conquests and seemingly unstoppable might instilled fear in some of his neighbors, who preferred to submit than to get crushed by his iron-wielding arm: demonstrating foresight which set him apart from many of his contemporaries among the Wildermen, he accepted their submission and ruled that not only should they continue to autonomously govern themselves but that their lands would be off-limits to his raiders as long as they paid Dakaruniku tribute in crafts, metals and occasionally slaves, thus creating a vassal network somewhat similar (though more brutal) to that of the Britons of Annún. And in addition to enslaving those rival populations who failed to kneel in a timely manner to work in his mines, he increasingly personally donated those slaves who weren't sacrificed to the gods of Dakaruniku to fellow tribesmen so that they might work the latter's fields, but with the understanding that his gifts were not freely given – since those tribesmen now no longer had to grow their own food and Dakaruniku abhorred idleness, they were to enlist in his warband with the promise of acquiring ever more plunder and glory in the future. The warchief thus not only brought about a greater militarization of Dakarunikuan society but social stratification too, forming the beginnings of a permanent underclass who worked to support an emerging martial aristocracy.
To Annún, Dakaruniku as a whole and even Kádaráš-rahbád still presented a friendly face and continued to engage in peaceable trade, counting on distance and honeyed words to prevent the Pilgrims from looking too deeply into what they were doing around the confluence of the Míssissépe. After all, as he himself noted, they still had a common enemy in the Three Fires Council. What interested Kádaráš-rahbád, even more-so than British iron now, was their livestock & especially horses: the Wildermen had not seen these beasts in many ages, since their ancestors had hunted the continent's horses to extinction at the end of the Ice Age, but the great warchief was intuitively aware of their value both on the farm and the battlefield, and had heard of how just a tiny handful of mounted British knights routed the entire army of the Three Fires decades before he was born. Unfortunately, the British were also keenly aware of the value of their steeds and absolutely refused to sell any to Dakaruniku, no matter what Kádaráš-rahbád or others offered in return. No matter, they did not willingly share the secrets of iron-working either, and yet the Dakarunikuans learned it through subterfuge & careful observation: Kádaráš-rahbád was sure an opportunity would eventually arise to abscond with a few of the Britons' horses, he just had to be patient.
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[1] Kunming.
[2] Dali Old Town, not be confused with the modern city of Dali (which has annexed it) to its south.
[3] Now part of Chongqing.
[4] Luzhou.
[5] Based off the Arikara words for the same, kaatarátš (axe) and rahpaat ('bloody'). Compare to NeesiRAhpát – 'Bloody Knife', the name of a prominent Sioux-Arikara scout in the Seventh Cavalry IRL.
[6] Specifically datura stramonium or jimsonweed, historically used as an entheogen by Amerindian peoples as far north as the Algonquian tribes and first encountered by Europeans when some English troops tasked with suppressing Bacon's Rebellion consumed it and incapacitated themselves for 11 days.
[7] Historically, this was done in the mid-eighth century by Pope Zachary.
[8] Now Zhongxian, part of Chongqing.
[9] While these customs may seem bizarre and certainly not waifu-material to most Western eyes (Meiji-era European visitors to Japan often reported that the Japanese ladies they encountered appeared beautiful until they smiled), these were all very real Japanese fashion trends & beauty standards/practices which persisted between the Heian and Meiji periods.
Their armies reinforced, both empires mutually agreed to terminate the truce and get right back to fighting in the late summer of this year. The Muslims captured Marida almost immediately to the northwest of fallen Dara & Nisibis in their opening attack, after which Ali & Burhan launched a feint toward Amida to the north to try to pull the Romans' attention away from their true objective – Edessa. However Romanus, Arwa and their generals saw through this scheme and trusted that Amida's existing garrison could repel whatever Islamic attack came their way from behind that stronghold city's mighty defenses, instead concentrating on the defense of the Ghassanid capital to the best of their ability. The stage was now set for one of the largest battles between Christian and Muslim armies in the ninth century, with both sides being roughly equally matched at nearly 30,000 strong.
The Saracen cavalry initiated hostilities by engaging in skirmishes and attempting a feigned retreat to draw the Romans out in pursuit, but Romanus didn't bite – not only had he learned from his previous battles with the Hashemites, but he was the defending side and saw no need to risk his secure position by chasing after the Muslims, especially when his own array of missile troops (chiefly the Ghassanid and Moorish auxiliaries) could already match the Islamic light cavalry blow-for-blow anyway. After this early skirmishing had proved inconclusive, Ali commanded his generals to engage the Christians more aggressively, backed by a favorable westward wind which had begun to blow in the legions' faces. The Romans fought back not only with the usual arrows and javelins but also with scorpion bolts, which were heavy enough to fly unbothered by the wind blowing against them and impale two or three Muslims at a time.
Holy Roman imperial scorpions and their crewmen, which would prove important to Romanus' strategy at the Battle of Edessa
At the climax of this engagement, a great wedge formed by 1,000 of the most heavily equipped elite soldiers in Ali's army – a mix of veteran and newly recruited ghilman, the latter being most eager to prove themselves while the former would provide them with guidance – managed to pierce through the central legions of Romanus' own battle line and surged straight toward his position. Rather than flee, the Emperor ordered his paladins to dismount and fight to the death with him around the Aloysian imperial standard and a great jewelled cross provided to him by Pope Sergius: he himself didn't stay on his own horse for long either, leaping from it and crushing an unfortunate ghulam to death beneath his great weight (to which his ornate armor was further added) very early in the fight. This display of valor inspired the Romans to stay in the field, and the arrival of troops from Duke Elpidios' reserve to plug the gap & cut off the Hashemite spearhead sealed their victory. Burhan al-Din had the retreat sounded near sunset, concluding the Battle of Edessa in a Christian victory and denying the Muslims their objective of completely destroying the Ghassanid realm before the year's end.
In the east, while the Liang were still held up at the great mountain passes protecting Ba-Shu's northern flank, the True Han decided to change gears in the south and eliminate the Tibetans' southern auxiliary in Nanzhong rather than continue trying to push up the Yangtze directly. The tribes of the southwest were fierce fighters well-accustomed to the high mountains and great jungles of their homeland, but once Liu Xuan and Liu Qin got going, their options were limited against the True Han armies which outnumbered theirs by 10:1. Meng Yuanlao's successor Meng Cheng fought courageously, slowing the advance of the behemoth Chinese columns with furious ambushes from the trees & hills and also engaging True Han divisions in open battle from time to time with Tibetan support. While the Nanzhong warriors were notably underequipped compared to their adversaries, as all but their most elite fighters wore rattan armor & carried shields made of the same bamboo-like material rather than iron, they used their home-ground advantage to great effect in slowing the Chinese advance, and further fielded beasts of war ranging from elephants to Meng's own menagerie of trained pet tigers.
Unfortunately for the Nanzhong, none of this proved sufficient to stop the deluge of Chinese soldiers pouring into their country, and despite the enormous frustrations they had encountered along the way, Liu Xuan and Liu Qin did manage to burn and fight their way to the barbarians' capital of Kunzhou[1]. Meng Cheng had evacuated his court & people to the more remote town of Dali[2] to the northwest ahead of the grinding Chinese onslaught and burned it down to deny the invaders food & shelter, but none of his tricks had proved sufficient to do much more than delay the inevitable. The Tibetans also needed to divert the contingents they had deployed to support him against the True Han (for all the good that was doing) back up north to defend the passes of Ba-Shu against Huanzong's increasingly sophisticated attacks, in which the Liang were employing siege engines that the Tibetans couldn't build themselves including mobile bridges, moat-filling covered wagons and siege towers: the northernmost Baishui Pass had already fallen to one of these better-planned and supported assaults. Another attempt by the Lhasa court to negotiate an end to hostilities failed around this time, as neither empire would be satisfied with anything less than the expulsion of the Tibetan presence in Ba-Shu.
Eighth-century Nanzhong warriors, most of whom can be seen sporting the rattan armor iconic to their people (save for the horseman wearing an iron helmet and lamellar vest). While the climbing palm was plentiful in their homeland and this armor was cheap & easy to manufacture, it was less protective than the iron armor of their much more numerous Chinese enemies, and also highly flammable
The coming of 817 also heralded the final large-scale engagements between the Roman and Hashemite empires. From Edessa Romanus and his legions surged forth to try to recapture Dara & Nisibis, thereby restoring the territorial status quo ante, but this was an outcome which the Muslims naturally strove to avert at all costs – it would not do, for either Ali or Burhan, to have their already incremental conquests (which did not measure up to Hussein's original goal at the start of all this in the first place, Antioch, now entirely out of their reach) reversed. The Romans got as far as Marida, which they temporarily recaptured, but were soon after defeated in a battle east of the city: there Ali & Burhan fielded a large camel corps to overcome the Roman cavalrymen, as well as a unit of war elephants brought all the way from India courtesy of the former's Alid cousins, though the latter proved less useful than the camelry thanks to the Romans' carroballistae.
The Saracens took Marida again after this victory and pursued the retreating Christians to Harran a ways south of Edessa, where they would fight the last battle of this particular round of Roman-Arab hostilities. Romanus sent envoys to the Hashemite camp the day before the battle began, declaring that both sides had surely bled enough and that it was time for them to negotiate a peace settlement, which Ali was originally inclined to accept until he was talked into fighting by Burhan, who suggested this message clearly meant that the Romans must be on their last legs. The Arabs had the better of the initial missile exchange, but when they closed in for combat they found that Romanus had copied the manner in which Burhan defeated him the first time they fought: the Roman lines around Harran were protected by trenches filled with wooden stakes and iron caltrops. Burhan himself lamented that Romanus had been a better student of his than even Ala ud-Din.
The Arab attack floundered, as even when they tried to attack between the trenches, they only found themselves funneled right into more caltrops and the waiting spears & shields of the heavily armored legionaries. When the Saracen advances had completely stalled, Romanus led a counterattack spearheaded by his heavy cavalry, which swept most of the Saracen army away – Burhan included, as the old Islamic generalissimo's horse threw him into one of the Roman trenches at this critical juncture. Ali personally intervened once more to rally his fleeing men and prevent a rout, but he was unable to completely reverse the tide of battle and only managed to impose order upon the Islamic retreat, thereby averting a total disaster. Suffice to say, he was certainly completely amenable to Romanus' appeal for peace now, what with the war-hawks at his court having not only been discredited but decapitated by the Battle of Harran. A few more weeks of inconclusive skirmishing followed (the Romans didn't have the strength to keep pushing forward either after the last few great battles they had fought, victory and loss alike) before a ceasefire was declared, hopefully one more lasting than the last, and the two emperors sat down for peace talks.
Greek cataphracts surging forth to sweep away the exhausted Saracen heavy cavalry at the climax of the Battle of Harran
In the distant east, the True Han continued to press their advance against the Nanzhong, who in turn were gradually falling back toward Dali in the west. Bereft of even the slightest hope of turning back the Chinese tide since his Tibetan allies diverted all their men northward to defend Ba-Shu, Meng Cheng grudgingly sued for terms before the Princes of Han & Chu could reach Dali itself, understanding that it was extremely unlikely that they'd be in a merciful mood if they got that close to achieving a total victory over him. As it turned out, the Liu princes were happy to avoid any further needling in the form of Nanzhong ambushes on their behemoth army, but they still very much had the upper hand and intended to use it: in his first act as a diplomat, Liu Xuan negotiated the submission of Nanzhong to his father and the True Han's annexation of those territories which they had managed to occupy before the ceasefire went into place, terms which were eminently acceptable to Dezu as well. The truncated Nanzhong state, now a vassal of the True Han, would be renamed the 'Kingdom of Dali' after its new and decidedly not-so-temporary capital, since Kunzhou remained under Chinese occupation.
Liu Xuan remained to solidify the True Han hold on their new southwestern province, which the records increasingly referred to as 'Yunnan' from this point onward, and so Liu Qin was sent northward alone to recover Ba-Shu from the Tibetans & hopefully also beat the Later Liang to Chengdu. In that regard he had some luck, as the Tibetan reinforcements pulled out of Yunnan earlier had been put to good use in Ba-Shu's northern mountain passes where they helped in continuing to hold back the massive and overpowering Liang hosts. Furthermore, Dali was required to contribute some of its warriors to an auxiliary detachment in the elder Liu's army as an early show of its new allegiance, resulting in there being a few thousand Dali warriors marching with their former Chinese enemies against their equally-former Tibetan allies toward the end of this year. The True Han were able to capture Yuzhou[3] and then Jiangyang[4] in southern Ba-Shu, which would serve them well as bases from which to press on northward to Chengdu.
Meanwhile on the other side of the planet, it was in 817 that the elders of Dakaruniku selected the man who will go down history as the first true king among the Wildermen: a physically strong and highly ambitious young warlord who fittingly carried the name 'Kádaráš-rahbád' – Dakarunikuan for 'Bloody Axe'[5] – selected on the basis that their shaman saw he would lead them to greater & more terrible heights than ever before in a datura[6]-induced vision and also because he had contracted the strange fevers brought by the Britons, and lived. To Kádaráš-rahbád, the ancient Míssissépené custom of leading by consensus and having the wisest, oldest men elect their chiefs were but obstacles to overcome: all who followed him into the battlefield had to obey his orders unconditionally, and while he allowed those closest to him (functionally his officers) to question and advise him on occasion, he ultimately always had the last word in what his warband did – disobedience was to be swiftly punished with an ax-blow to the skull, no more, no less. So too should it be in his new chiefdom, he thought. On a similar note, he had fathered and would continue to sire many strong children with numerous women, and saw no reason as to why he should let any council pass over them when they were natural successors to his legacy.
Young Kádaráš-rahbád shortly after becoming chief of Dakaruniku, wielding the iron ax for which he was known and flanked by one of his concubines and a lieutenant from his warband. In hindsight, drug-induced visions/hallucinations were probably not the greatest way to choose the leader of one's growing civilization, especially if this leader's name was literally 'Bloody Axe'
In the Levant, the first months of 818 were spent by the Holy Roman Empire and its Caliphal rival on hashing out terms for a peace treaty that would, hopefully, last longer than the Peace of Samosata. The Romans had to further concede Dara and Nisibis, which they could not recover, to the Muslims: Ghassanid Mesopotamia thus had been further truncated to Edessa, Amida and the lands in-between, making for a very small buffer between Greek Anatolia and the Hashemites indeed, though Romanus' final victories had at least bought this last Christian Arab realm a few more decades or even another century. In exchange the Muslims had to dismantle the northern Syrian fortifications they'd been throwing up to serve as well-defended forward bases against Antioch, to re-affirm the right of the Augustus Imperator to appoint Ionian Patriarchs in the three Sees under their power (as well as to generally restore public toleration of the Ionian community within their borders), and to pay a one-off lump sum to refill the Roman treasury as an indemnity for starting the war in the first place. The Romans may have still lost more ground, but considering the circumstances at the difficult start of Romanus' reign, things certainly could've turned out much worse for them.
Though Romanus and Ali's good interpersonal relations may not keep them at peace indefinitely, it would serve to give this new 'Peace of Marida' a more solid foundation (by way of both emperors being less personally inclined to attack their new friend than their fathers had ever been) than the Peace of Samosata. With this compromise in place, Romanus made his way back home, mediating in various old disputes between the South Slavs and new ones among the Italians as he went. A growing thorn in the Mediterranean underbelly of the Aloysians' dominion was the growing tension between the merchant princes of Italy – spearheaded by the increasingly wealthy and powerful Venetians – and their South Slavic neighbors to the east, on account of their trade in slaves of a mostly Slavic origin. Now industrial-scale slavery as practiced by the Roman Empire at its height was still well entrenched in the south of the Roman world, despite damage done to the system by the barbarian invasions and periodically by the Stilichians, as numerous slaves toiled on the latifundiae of the aristocracy (far from all of them having sided against Stilicho's heirs, after all, and now including even some descendants of Stilichian beneficiaries who moved up to fill the vacuum left by those older houses toppled for betting against them) alongside the serfs who weren't much better off, and also as was traditional not a few more educated slaves were retained in the households of their masters.
Imperial law forbade selling Christian slaves to non-Christians and forcefully taking imperial subjects as slaves, so to feed demand the Italians had cultivated trading ties with the Khazars (and through them, the Norsemen of Ladoga even further to the north) in order to buy pagan slaves for trade to the Muslims and other Christian kingdoms around the Mediterranean under the Aloysian aegis, a trade which they even dared engage in under the table when Rome warred with either or both of these rival powers. However, while this was the official line (and probably actually true in the majority of cases), there can be little doubt that Italian slave traders certainly bought Christian slaves taken from Ruthenia, Poland or lands under Roman rule (such as Dacia) in Khazar attacks while consciously avoiding asking any questions. And while the Croats and Carantanians might not be feeling any particularly great sentiment of pan-Slavic solidarity toward Ruthenians and Poles (or each other for that matter), they also accused the Venetians of having targeted their border settlements for plundering & slave-taking in the upheaval of Romanus' regency, while his mother had been too busy juggling much greater threats to worry much about Italian corsairs targeting South Slavic villages.
Part of a villa mosaic from Campania depicting a ruddy-haired Slavic slave tilling the soil of his owner's latifundium. Well, what were the chances that both this issue and the Zanj one in the Islamic world might come to the forefront around the same timeframe down the line?
Romanus found himself faced with a conundrum, since while he was hardly the biggest fan of the concept of slavery and did not want to needlessly anger the same Slavic subjects he had just spent an inordinate amount of time keeping at peace, the Italians had proven to be highly important to battling the growing threat of the Saracen at sea and would doubtless retain that role for many centuries to come, so he certainly did not wish to antagonize them either. Furthermore, Gaul & especially Germania might be the Aloysians' biggest recruiting grounds and where their most faithful subjects lived, but Italy constituted their single largest and most profitable tax base (even if Constantinople was grander than Rome itself or Ravenna, Italy as a whole paid more into the imperial coffers than Greece did, in part because the officials of the Praetorian Prefecture of the Orient had always enjoyed less central scrutiny since the days of Aloysius I & Helena and thus had more room to skim off taxes than their Italic counterparts) – and certainly the trade dues levied upon Italian commerce were a big part of that.
Thus, while the Papacy had forbidden slave trafficking in Rome itself and Pope Sergius even renewed the tradition of buying the freedom of slaves trafficked there by his fellow Italians[7], Romanus levied some punishments on the Italians – fining his Galbaio in-laws and others for raiding his South Slavic subjects, issuing compensation from said fines to those neighboring principalities, and mandating the immediate freeing of any Christians found among their slave pens – but he promised only to better enforce the existing laws on the books, not to tighten a noose around Mediterranean slavery on the Christian side of the sea. The job of finding a more permanent resolution to the growing Italo-Slavic tensions, as well as the theological contradictions between Christianity and the Roman institution of slavery – the assimilation of the British clergy, who though Ionian now had doubtless inherited Pelagian ideas around freedom and its primacy in God's eyes from their forefathers, having turned out to be a major boon to the anti-slavery faction among the Roman Patriarchate – was one he'd leave to his descendants, just as his predecessors had left more than a few troubles in his lap.
While a great war had come to a close in the Occident, a new one was beginning to spin up in the Orient. From his newly secured bases in southern Ba-Shu, Liu Qin attacked northward to Chengdu this year, driving the hopelessly outnumbered Tibetans back into the city. Elements among the Chinese citizenry, who had little to like in the extortionate rule of the barbarians since the Tibetans had shown themselves to be arbitrary and oft-extortionate masters over the past decades, hatched a plot to sabotage the city gates for the besiegers' benefit: and to signal which gate to attack to the Prince of Chu, their leaders – three sages affiliated with the Southern Celestial Master sect of Taoism which Dezu was a patron of – set off a cluster of alchemical mixtures wrapped in rolls of paper which they would throw from the walls. The first firecrackers in recorded history did their job, and Liu Qin was able to successfully storm the city and put its Tibetan defenders to the sword before the end of 818. However, by this time the Liang had themselves broken through the Jianmen and Xiameng Passes, and captured both the profitable salt wells of Langzhong and Zitong with its great Jin-era Qiqushan Temple. Huanzong was decidedly less than amused upon being informed that the True Han had beaten him to Chengdu and now weren't going to hand it over, despite their preexisting agreement, which he was now going to tear up for having just demonstrated its worthlessness.
Chinese saboteurs working for the True Han launching a firecracker into the sky to identify which of Chengdu's gates their countrymen should be attacking
By 819, Romanus had definitively returned to Trévere and once more held court from atop the throne second only to God's in the Aula Palatina. Aside from ensuring that Hispania did not descend into war between the Africans and their northern adversaries again, he was finally able to turn his attention to the growing Viking scourge on his northern coast. A singular legion was dispatched to Britannia under one of his uncle Haistulf's lieutenants at the request of both the Pendragons and Raedwaldings, and at this stage they proved sufficient to support the Britannic kingdoms in lining the beaches of Rome's northernmost federates with the heads of reavers on stakes and rapidly deter further raids – for a time. The Emperor also demanded redress for the earlier attacks on the Belgic coast from the King of Denmark, Horik Sigfriedson (great-grandson of Holger I, the king who interacted with Romanus' own great-great-grandfather Aloysius II), but was refused on the grounds that Scylding royal clan had nothing to do with the attack, even if some of the reavers involved may have been Danish. While this may have been true, it was unverifiable and unsatisfactory to the Augustus Imperator, who now set his mind to launching a punitive expedition against the Danes.
Over the new border with the Hashemites, Caliph Ali was engaged in some house-cleaning. The death of Burhan al-Din in the Battle of Edessa, while depriving the armies of Islam of their most accomplished and most senior general, had been something of a hidden boon to the latest Heir of the Prophet, much like Nusrat al-Din's death in battle had been to his great-grandfather Hashim a century prior. Ali compelled most of Burhan's appointees to retire in comfort and replaced them with a younger generation of ghilman – including many newly-minted veterans of the latest Roman-Arab war – whose loyalties and interests were more strongly aligned with himself than their predecessors, and appointed a civil leader with no significant military ties as his Grand Vizier in the form of the mawla Abbas al-Babili, a Babylonian Jewish convert to Islam. To cap off his consolidation of power, he awarded the senior Egyptian general Husam al-Din with the right to finally marry & have his own family as well as a luxurious estate in the Nile Delta to raise said family on in retirement, so as to get him out of the way of the younger Ala ud-Din's appointment to leadership of the Islamic forces.
Ali ibn Hassan idolized his ancestor Hashim, considered the second best example of a strong Hashemite Caliph after only Qasim ibn Muhammad himself, and tried to imitate his successes, down to maintaining correspondence with a Holy Roman Emperor who he personally considered a friend despite waging the occasional war with the Rūmī
In China, the armies of Later Liang and True Han once more came to blows, though for the time being their energies were entirely confined to Ba-Shu and especially toward the control of Chengdu. The northern approach to that city was covered by the Mianzhu Pass, already garrisoned by the Han, so Huanzong campaigned in eastern and southern Ba-Shu instead with the objective of bypassing the Han's prepared defenses and also isolating the tarnished but still great city from the rest of the Southern Dynasty's territories. Liu Qin saw through his gambit and countered accordingly, engaging the Liang forces in a number of bloody but generally inconclusive engagements across the eastern Chengdu Plain throughout 819. Of these the largest and fiercest was also the last, fought near Linjiang[8], turned to be a more conclusive Liang victory, allowing Huanzong to finally begin cutting his arch-rival off from the True Han court along the upper length of the Yangtze. The Prince of Chu understood the danger he was now in, and called upon Liu Xuan to march from Dali to aid him.
Beyond the seas east of the sundered Middle Kingdom, the Yamato were busily cultivating their increasingly distinct culture's traditions – kokufū bunka, the 'national culture' – for the benefit of future generations in peace. To start with, the instability in China and a corresponding further slowing of Chinese exports to Japan (already massively hampered after the Yamato broke free of Chinese suzerainty in the twilight years of the Later Han) opened up an opportunity for the imperial court newly settled at Heian-kyō to develop their own writing system: no longer would the Japanese express their thoughts in writing with Chinese characters, but rather they used their own from this point onward, called hiragana. Tea plantations were also established near Heian-kyō, taking advantage of the plant's seeds being transported to Japan by traveling Buddhist monks, and with them were planted the seeds of the intricate Japanese tea ceremony. The court of Go-Saimei also undertook efforts to distance their fashion styles from those of the Liang and Han courts, popularizing more colorful & elaborate styles of kimono (which, when worn in layers, now constituted the formal fashion of the Yamato imperial court: sokutai for men and jūnihitoe for women) in addition to face-painting with rice powder (oshiroi) and applying a red lip paint made from safflowers (beni), eyebrow-plucking (hikimayu), and the blackening of teeth using a sort of iron-gall ink (hagurome, later renamed ohaguro) as the new beauty standards of their people[9].
Emperor Go-Saimei, his empress-consort ('Kōgō') Chūshi and their eldest son Crown Prince Korehito (future Emperor Montoku), demonstrating the Japanese aesthetic trends developed in the early ninth century
Half a world away from the Japanese and their peaceful cultivation of culture, Kádaráš-rahbád was rapidly escalating from mere raiding to lead the Dakarunikuans in a conquering spree against their neighbors: rather than allow any rival elite to persist and potentially organize schemes for revenge, he developed his habit of wiping out the chiefly families except for a single woman of childbearing age, who he would then marry to one of his lieutenants. Said lieutenant would be installed in the defeated tribe's town, not quite as a new chief but as functionally a satrap of Dakaruniku's, and be supported by a garrison of loyal warriors who had also taken wives from the ranks of the subjugated (the ones who hadn't already been killed in the earlier fighting or enslaved and packed off to Dakaruniku proper, anyway). Of those men and women who chose slavery rather than death after being overcome by Dakaruniku's copper-and-iron-wielding warriors, Kádaráš-rahbád did not send them all to Dakaruniku, nor did he sacrifice all those who he took for himself to his gods: rather, he strove to monopolize control of the copper & iron mines he found, and settled these enslaved rival Wildermen to work those mines in a bid to develop a metalworking industry under his exclusive control, which would be key to his future plans. In this manner the ambitious warlord built a power-base loyal to himself, not to Dakaruniku – an important step toward his grand vision for a mighty empire which all those around him would bow to in terror.
The Romans set about preparing their punitive expedition against Denmark throughout 820. Not only did cavalry squadrons detached from the Treverian legions aggressively patrol the Belgic coast with the intent of massacring those Vikings still so over-bold as to raid lands close to the Aloysian capital even after the Emperor had returned, but Romanus also launched a recruiting drive in these regions to refill the ranks of said legions, pitching his appeal to the locals on the grounds that surely they must want revenge against the Norsemen who have increasingly plagued their shores; attacked their towns and places of worship; and carried off their daughters in recent years. He rebuilt Bruges to not only serve as a nexus of North Sea trade again, but also as a military port and the base for a permanent imperial naval squadron to combat the Vikings at sea, hopefully before they land and start pillaging on the continent. The Saxons, Thuringians and Lutici also began to engage in raids & skirmishes of their own on the Danish border, not just in retaliation for any Viking raid to strike their lands by sea or river (regardless of whether the perpetrators were actually Danes) but also to soften up Danish defenses ahead of their overlord's larger planned attack. Amid this excitement, Romanus did not forget to finally father an heir with his Empress Joana, who was born this year and baptized Aloysius.
Treverian legionaries and local Belgic militiamen attacking a Viking raiding party as the latter try to flee with their ill-gotten goods & thralls
Meanwhile, the Later Liang spent much of 820 maneuvering to finish surrounding & besieging Liu Qin in Chengdu, taking Yuzhou and Jiangyang as their opening move before locking down the rest of the southern Ba-Shu plain and decisively forcing the Prince of Chu behind the western bastion's walls in the Battle of Guanghan. Meanwhile, Liu Xuan had been busy requesting reinforcements from his father and securing the allegiance of the non-Chinese tribal chiefs in the parts of Yunnan which he had just conquered: with Dezu's authorization he handed down mild terms for their submission, requiring the chieftains to kowtow before the Emperor in order to receive his sanction as the rightful ruler of their tribe, pay an annual tribute, and not deviate from the foreign policy of the True Han – which certainly extended to supplying the dynasty with native auxiliaries in wartime, such as right now. Thus the Prince of Han was able to assemble a new 100,000-man army in and around Yunnan this year, a fifth of whom were a collection of Miao, Lolo, Bai, etc. auxiliaries who in all likelihood had fought against them as part of the Nanzhong army not too long before.
With this host, Liu Xuan set out to save his kinsman. Rather than take the expected approach from the south and fight his way through Liang-held Yuzhou & Jiangyang, the Han crown prince moved in from the southwest, crossing through the western mountain passes with the guidance of his native scouts and emerging to threaten the Liang army's rear from Mount Emei. Huanzong was caught off-guard and lifted the siege to avoid getting caught in-between the emerging True Han pincer, allowing the Lius to meet and merge their forces on the Chengdu plain. Together they forced the Liang hosts back out into eastern & northern Ba-Shu, in the process overcoming the Liang rearguard in the Third Battle of Guanghan. However, Huanzong was not far from defeated and planned to continue trying to conquer Chengdu (as well as the rest of Ba-Shu), on top of seeking a fated third and final duel with Liu Qin.
Now the two men might be in their sixties, but they were both still fit and fierce fighters for their age, and though his red hair may have turned entirely silver the Northern Emperor saw no reason as to why he should not try to make good on his threat to his rival that the next time they fought in person would be the last – whichever of them died, at least they would go out in a more memorable fashion than simply dying of old age in bed. Meanwhile, the Tibetans had retreated to the eastern mountains of the Kham region, where they recruited heavily from the local Khampa and Baima populations and waited for a chance to jump on whoever won the ongoing battle for Ba-Shu. Luckily for Tritsuk Löntsen (who, though greatly aged, was still a little younger than either Liu Qin or Huanzong) and his westernmost vassal, the Muslims were still too weary from fighting two wars in a row (or arguably, one long war with a short truce in-between) with the Holy Roman Empire to launch a campaign against the Indo-Romans right now, though the Alid princes continued to apply pressure against them in the form of ghazw raids in the interim.
Emperor Huanzong of Later Liang in his twilight years, plotting out what he hopes to be a final glorious confrontation with his worthy opponent Liu Qin over the late winter of 820
In the far west, Kádaráš-rahbád continued to assemble the building blocks of empire. Word of his conquests and seemingly unstoppable might instilled fear in some of his neighbors, who preferred to submit than to get crushed by his iron-wielding arm: demonstrating foresight which set him apart from many of his contemporaries among the Wildermen, he accepted their submission and ruled that not only should they continue to autonomously govern themselves but that their lands would be off-limits to his raiders as long as they paid Dakaruniku tribute in crafts, metals and occasionally slaves, thus creating a vassal network somewhat similar (though more brutal) to that of the Britons of Annún. And in addition to enslaving those rival populations who failed to kneel in a timely manner to work in his mines, he increasingly personally donated those slaves who weren't sacrificed to the gods of Dakaruniku to fellow tribesmen so that they might work the latter's fields, but with the understanding that his gifts were not freely given – since those tribesmen now no longer had to grow their own food and Dakaruniku abhorred idleness, they were to enlist in his warband with the promise of acquiring ever more plunder and glory in the future. The warchief thus not only brought about a greater militarization of Dakarunikuan society but social stratification too, forming the beginnings of a permanent underclass who worked to support an emerging martial aristocracy.
To Annún, Dakaruniku as a whole and even Kádaráš-rahbád still presented a friendly face and continued to engage in peaceable trade, counting on distance and honeyed words to prevent the Pilgrims from looking too deeply into what they were doing around the confluence of the Míssissépe. After all, as he himself noted, they still had a common enemy in the Three Fires Council. What interested Kádaráš-rahbád, even more-so than British iron now, was their livestock & especially horses: the Wildermen had not seen these beasts in many ages, since their ancestors had hunted the continent's horses to extinction at the end of the Ice Age, but the great warchief was intuitively aware of their value both on the farm and the battlefield, and had heard of how just a tiny handful of mounted British knights routed the entire army of the Three Fires decades before he was born. Unfortunately, the British were also keenly aware of the value of their steeds and absolutely refused to sell any to Dakaruniku, no matter what Kádaráš-rahbád or others offered in return. No matter, they did not willingly share the secrets of iron-working either, and yet the Dakarunikuans learned it through subterfuge & careful observation: Kádaráš-rahbád was sure an opportunity would eventually arise to abscond with a few of the Britons' horses, he just had to be patient.
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[1] Kunming.
[2] Dali Old Town, not be confused with the modern city of Dali (which has annexed it) to its south.
[3] Now part of Chongqing.
[4] Luzhou.
[5] Based off the Arikara words for the same, kaatarátš (axe) and rahpaat ('bloody'). Compare to NeesiRAhpát – 'Bloody Knife', the name of a prominent Sioux-Arikara scout in the Seventh Cavalry IRL.
[6] Specifically datura stramonium or jimsonweed, historically used as an entheogen by Amerindian peoples as far north as the Algonquian tribes and first encountered by Europeans when some English troops tasked with suppressing Bacon's Rebellion consumed it and incapacitated themselves for 11 days.
[7] Historically, this was done in the mid-eighth century by Pope Zachary.
[8] Now Zhongxian, part of Chongqing.
[9] While these customs may seem bizarre and certainly not waifu-material to most Western eyes (Meiji-era European visitors to Japan often reported that the Japanese ladies they encountered appeared beautiful until they smiled), these were all very real Japanese fashion trends & beauty standards/practices which persisted between the Heian and Meiji periods.
Ghassanids need new country.
Maybe Carribeans,when romans finally discover them?
Or,sometching on Khazar border? Emperor need good calvary there.
Japan - black teeths ? well,it could be not ink,they could be some local monsters !
And,aside from jokes - if they hear about romans in America,they could try go there using Kuro -sivo.In OTL at least few vessels accidentally get there.
Here,we could have Japan colony in Oregon ,or California.
Slaves among slaves in OTL russians made themselves rich selling them to jews,the same was going Czech princes and first polish rulers.
In fact,Poland could have standing army ONLY becouse we sell slaves./3.900 in 966/
Here,it could happen ,too.And,since romans emperors need as many soldiers as possible,they probably not stop that.
Blood Axe - good,we need some Mad Max type there to made life more interesting.
At least ,he is not bloody idiot like Aztecs,which basically did everytching they could to become not only cunts,but cunts who would fall to first invader with modern weapons.
Danes - they were not capable of facing HRE in OTL when they had Obodrite allies,so now they are even more fucked.
All they could do is really stop raidings HRE,or...ally with muslims,or even better welcome them? it would be fun,if muslims take over Scandinavia 1300 years earlier then in OTL !
Jokes aside - they could still raid Ireland,and America.
Maybe Carribeans,when romans finally discover them?
Or,sometching on Khazar border? Emperor need good calvary there.
Japan - black teeths ? well,it could be not ink,they could be some local monsters !
And,aside from jokes - if they hear about romans in America,they could try go there using Kuro -sivo.In OTL at least few vessels accidentally get there.
Here,we could have Japan colony in Oregon ,or California.
Slaves among slaves in OTL russians made themselves rich selling them to jews,the same was going Czech princes and first polish rulers.
In fact,Poland could have standing army ONLY becouse we sell slaves./3.900 in 966/
Here,it could happen ,too.And,since romans emperors need as many soldiers as possible,they probably not stop that.
Blood Axe - good,we need some Mad Max type there to made life more interesting.
At least ,he is not bloody idiot like Aztecs,which basically did everytching they could to become not only cunts,but cunts who would fall to first invader with modern weapons.
Danes - they were not capable of facing HRE in OTL when they had Obodrite allies,so now they are even more fucked.
All they could do is really stop raidings HRE,or...ally with muslims,or even better welcome them? it would be fun,if muslims take over Scandinavia 1300 years earlier then in OTL !
Jokes aside - they could still raid Ireland,and America.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
It's interesting to see how the wildermen society is changing due to adoption of metal. It also came to me that the name wildermen will probably stick in this timeline as it is unlikely further European explorers will mistake the continent for India.
The final confrontation between Huanzong and Liu Quin is sure being set up as a grand one.
[Yugoslav anthem starts playing]
Well, Romanus certainly did well for the start of his reign, too bad chroniclers seemed to be more focused on girth...
...though that might be warranted.
The final confrontation between Huanzong and Liu Quin is sure being set up as a grand one.
[Yugoslav anthem starts playing]
Well, Romanus certainly did well for the start of his reign, too bad chroniclers seemed to be more focused on girth...
...though that might be warranted.